Publisher's description: Alexander, a civil rights advocate and legal scholar, argues that, despite decades of legal dismantling of Jim Crow and the election of the nation's first black president, the racial caste system has not ended in America; it has only been redesigned. In this legal and historical study, Alexander documents how the targeting of black men by the criminal justice system in the war on drugs functions as a system of racial control:...

America likes to tell itself that it inhabits a postracial world, yet nearly every empirical measure--wealth, unemployment, incarceration, school segregation--reveals that racial inequality has barely improved since 1968, when Richard Nixon became our first "law and order" president. Hayes examines the surge in crime that began in the 1960s and peaked in the 1990s, and the unprecedented decline that followed. Drawing on close-hand reporting at flashpoints...