The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is the book I wish I'd been assigned in my US history classes in school. Reading it made me understand for the first time exactly why our criminal justice system is the mess it is today, and it is easily one of the most important books I've ever read.

It's a well known fact that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, far surpassing that of countries like Russia and China which we often consider to have particularly draconian penal policies. But what I was surprised to realize that I never really considered before was that our current rates of incarceration would have been unimaginable before the 1980's. It was the War on Drugs ushered in by the Nixon administration that directly led to our current reality of overfilled prisons, despite the fact that drug use was actually decreasing at the time.

What Alexander lays out coherently and methodically is that the War on Drugs and the subsequent age of mass incarceration, particularly the incarceration of black men who are arrested and imprisoned at absurdly disproportionate rates when white men are actually far more likely to commit crimes, have created a new racial caste system in which people with criminal records can be legally excluded from their rights to voting, public housing, and federal aid, effectively relegating them to a new underclass.