Michelle Alexander

A few decades ago, the left and the right, politicians and the public, universally embraced the criminalization of drug use. But a new consensus has emerged.

Law enforcement and the urban-rural divide.

The rise​ of mass incarceration in the early 1970s was fueled by white fear of black crime. But the fear of crime wasn’t confined to whites.

Since the 1950s, disparities along class and racial lines have defined the nation's drug policy.

The traditional narrative of an integrationist vs. Black Power binary fades in the context of global movements for self-determination.

The pillars aren’t new. They were built over decades, with bipartisan consensus.

Two new books examine how colonial logic has long been embedded within US carceral systems.

The civil-rights attorney has created a sculpture park, indicting the city of Montgomery—a former capital of the domestic slave trade.

In 1790, Philadelphia opened the first American penitentiary, with the US's first solitary cells. Black people were disproportionately punished from the start.

The diminished status of the non-white working class is not a matter of accident, but of design.

Nothing could be more toxic to our ongoing effort to build a multiracial democracy than to cast any race as a perennial hero or villain.

Reckoning with the legacy of Japanese internment in the South.

Beyond packing schemes, we need to diminish the high court’s power.

Not since Reconstruction has there been such an opportunity for the advancement of racial justice.

Cuts to public services that might mitigate poverty and promote social mobility have become a perpetual excuse for more policing.

The US carceral state is a monstrosity with few parallels in history. But most accounts fail to understand how it was created, and how we can dismantle it.

Everything you knew about mass incarceration is wrong.

The rising tie between black activism and pro-Palestinian advocacy.

Two new books, including ‘Locking Up Our Own,’ address major blind spots about the causes of America’s carceral failure.

Elizabeth Hinton discusses how twentieth-century policymakers anticipated the explosion of the prison population.