In quiet yet forceful writing Alexander, a legal scholar, outlines how the Reagan government exploited 1980s hysteria over crack cocaine to demonise the black population so that 'black' and 'crime' became interchangeable. It was a war – not on drugs – but on black people ... Notwithstanding improvements to the US judicial system, this distressing book offers important lessons for all societies that claim colour-blindness but enact policies that scapegoat marginalised groups. Colour-blindness leads to denial, believes Alexander; better to strive for colour-consciousness.

Now and then a book comes along that might in time touch the public and educate social commentators, policymakers, and politicians about a glaring wrong that we have been living with that we also somehow don’t know how to face. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander is such a work ... Alexander is not the first to offer this bitter analysis, but The New Jim Crow is striking in the intelligence of her ideas, her powers of summary, and the force of her writing. Her tone is disarming throughout; she speaks as a concerned citizen, not as an expert, though she is one. She can make the abstract concrete, as J. Saunders Redding once said in praise of W.E.B. Du Bois, and Alexander deserves to be compared to Du Bois in her ability to distill and lay out as mighty human drama a complex argument and history.

The book marshals pages of statistics and legal citations to argue that the get-tough approach to crime that began in the Nixon administration and intensified with Ronald Reagan’s declaration of the war on drugs has devastated black America ... For many African-Americans, the book — which has spent six weeks on the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list — gives eloquent and urgent expression to deep feelings that the criminal justice system is stacked against them.

The New Jim Crow has captivated many Americans’ attention since it was published in 2010. Michelle Alexander has become the poster woman for ending the drug war and mass incarceration, for policy reform and for mass movement organizing. She wrote this book for liberals like her to alert them that this system—in which people are being targeted, criminalized, stereotyped to support popular complacent consent for criminalization, incarcerated, and then denied full citizenship upon release—is a legacy to the racial caste system that was Jim Crow. While this I believe to be true, I also believe that there is more to unfold in the story than Alexander has presented in her book ... While this book and Alexander don’t go far enough for me in exposing that the globally sanctioned structure of racial casting has always led to state-proliferated mechanisms of domination and control, and although I find it unfortunate that someone who may still be grasping with all of these far-reaching effects is one of the loudest voices on this issue, maybe now that more people are having this conversation because of her book, it will force them to recognize the deep societal and personal implications of mass incarceration.

Once in a great while a writer at the opposite end of the political spectrum gets you to look at a familiar set of facts in a new way. Disconcerting as it is, you can feel your foundation shift as your mind struggles to reconcile this new point of view with long held beliefs. Michelle Alexander has done just that in her book, The New Jim Crow ... Through a series of anecdotes accompanied by a steady drumbeat of statistics, Alexander makes a compelling case that one of the key pillars of the fruitless war on drugs is selective enforcement coupled with plea bargain-driven judicial railroading ... Whether you agree with her thesis or not, Michelle Alexander makes you think about mass incarceration in a new way. The pro-life movement could take a lesson from her if they hope to inject some fresh thinking into their advocacy.

...[an] explosive debut ... Many will dismiss the author’s assertions; others will find her observations persuasive enough to give pause ... Alarming, provocative and convincing.