Michelle Alexander

So I started grad school in 2010.

And if you remember, this was just around when the new Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's book was published.

So this very prominent professor came and gave this talk.

And, you know, it was a great talk.

I know.

But for folks that aren't familiar, maybe I would recommend books like The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Davis to really get a sense of why I've come to the conclusion that prisons create more harm than they create safety in our lives and in our community and in our society.

And I could talk for an hour about that.

I'll just say that working with incarcerated people has been one of the greatest privileges of my entire life.

And I ended into a DEI course.

I read the reading list, Michelle Alexander, Tanisha Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, D'Angelo, all of them.

And then I read countering views.

And I went back to 1942 with Ashley Montague, who you might remember.

It tells you this is how you should think when you're making your investment decisions.

And second thing is I had the really wonderful experience about a week ago of reconnecting with one of my Stanford Law School classmates Michelle Alexander.

Michelle is the author of a book called The New Jim Crow.

My law school class was extraordinary.

We're pretend readers.

That's why we think Michelle Alexander is amazing.

The Hate U Give New American Classic.

That's why we're not the smartest.

But I think what changed is.

You know, the end of Jim Crow, the end of a certain kind of oppression, the beginning of this mass incarceration moment that we have now, like Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow talks about and and so many others.

And yeah, so I don't know if it's.

I mean, I don't and I still I don't hear it as being necessarily anesthetized.

In addition to the inhumane conditions, the deteriorating infrastructure, and the inadequate physical and mental health support systems, the family and friends of people incarcerated at Rikers also suffer because of its isolated location, restrictions on visits, and the overall emotional toll of missing their loved ones.

This country's racist and unjust criminal justice system, what Michelle Alexander has deemed the new Jim Crow, serves as a form of collective punishment.

It is a system in desperate need of teshuva, of repentance, of repair, and of return.

The month of Elul invites us, urges us, calls upon us to do the necessary work of teshuva on a variety of levels.

penal prison labor yeah i mean basically i

wanted to there's this book that i really wanted to read i mean there were two books i wanted to read for this but i could just recommend them it was our prisons obsolete by angela davis and then there was this other book called the new jim crow which came out in 2010 by Michelle Alexander and I really want to read it it sounds really interesting and it's basically how just like war on drugs mass incarceration basically replaced the Jim Crow era where it's like you don't have segregation anymore technically but instead you're just um having a disproportionate yeah disproportionately arresting black men and incarcerating them on minor drug charges

I watched like a, I think I watched like a documentary on it.

It was on, I think Netflix ages ago, but it was specifically about like, yeah, how they sort of segregate black and white neighborhoods in America through like the way they charge for like cocaine or like crack cocaine, even though it's the exact same thing, but one of them is like more prevalent in black communities.

And, you know, given the work that I do in terms of advocacy and trying to apply research, people are still very criminal, you know, focused on criminalization in this country, even in 26.

Even after all the books, I know you start with Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, and you talk about how the root of Jim Crow and The New Jim Crow is Jane Crow.

And yet, even today, in spite of the books and the talks and the activism and Ferguson and George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Sandra Bland, people are still very... quick to send people away, disappear people, and a lot of that route is anti-black racism.

So what I'm interested in is how we can move the presumption from criminalization to giving people a chance to live to disentangle accountability from a prison system, given the history that you outline in this book.