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RECOMMENED READING 

1.  Alexander, M. (2020). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness (10th anniversary ed.). The New Press.

Main Points and Narrative

• In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America; we have simply redesigned it.
• Alexander provides evidence that black men and communities of color are disproportionately overpoliced, thereby decimating communities of color; because of this, she asserts that the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness.
• Michelle Alexander contends that mass incarceration in the United States constitutes a new racial caste system akin to Jim Crow, effectively a system of racial social control masked by the veneer of colorblindness.
• She argues that the War on Drugs, especially the crack‑cocaine sentencing disparities and aggressive policing policies, disproportionately targeted Black and brown communities and created a “racial undercaste” of individuals labeled as criminals, thereby denying them full citizenship rights in areas such as employment, housing, education, voting, and jury service.
• Her scope of “incarceration” extends beyond prisons to include parole, probation, and any label that stigmatizes individuals long after physical confinement has ended.

Contributions to Reform Advocacy

Alexander doesn’t just diagnose the problem; she galvanized an entirely new front in civil rights activism by insisting that mass incarceration must be treated as a central civil rights issue. She critiques the civil rights community for largely ignoring the criminal justice system, calling for a shift in priorities to include penal reform as integral to racial justice. The impact of her work is evident: The New Jim Crow helped inspire movements and initiatives such as Black Lives Matter, the Marshall Project, and the Art for Justice Fund. The book’s influence extends to law, policy, academia, and grassroots organizing, prompting a widespread public conversation about structural racism and persistent inequality in the justice system.

Hope for Change

Despite its sobering analysis, The New Jim Crow offers hope for change by demonstrating that awareness can drive reform. Alexander calls on civil rights advocates, policymakers, and the public to confront the racial injustices embedded in the criminal justice system and to push for transformative policies that dismantle mass incarceration. By exposing the roots of systemic racism and encouraging collective action, the book envisions a society where equity, justice, and inclusion replace fear, punishment, and racial oppression, inspiring readers to believe in the possibility of meaningful reform.

Michelle Alexander (Bio)

Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, legal scholar, and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Since 2018, she has been an opinion columnist for the New York Times. Alexander is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University and an associate professor of law at the Ohio State University.

2. Stevenson, B. (2014). Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Spiegel & Grau. 

Main Points and Narrative

• In Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson combines memoir and legal case history to expose systematic injustices in the U.S. criminal justice system.
• Central to the narrative is the case of Walter McMillian, a Black man wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death, whose fight for exoneration becomes emblematic of broader racial and systemic bias.
• He highlights the deep racial disparities within the criminal justice system, showing how systemic racism disproportionately targets Black communities and other marginalized groups through policies such as the War on Drugs and harsh sentencing laws.
• Stevenson interweaves this story with those of other marginalized clients, such as children sentenced to life without parole, the mentally ill, and the poor, demonstrating how race, poverty, and inadequate representation contribute to unjust outcomes.
• His overall argument urges society to choose compassion and mercy over condemnation and punishment, asserting that dehumanizing the condemned harms us all.

Contributions to Prison Reform Advocacy

 Just Mercy has served as a powerful moral and social call to action, drawing attention to systemic racism, the death penalty’s flaws, and the need for better legal representation for the underserved. The book’s implications for prison reform are far-reaching. Beyond diagnosing the problem, Stevenson calls for meaningful reform by advocating for a justice system grounded in rehabilitation, mercy, and compassion rather than punishment, emphasizing the need to humanize those affected and pursue policies that promote restoration over retribution. Just Mercy has become a catalyst for reform efforts, motivating policymakers, activists, and communities to challenge systemic injustices and work toward a more humane and equitable criminal justice system.

Hope for Change

Despite its sobering content, the book inspires hope by sharing stories of resilience, redemption, and the transformative power of advocacy and compassion. Stevenson emphasizes that meaningful reform is possible when society embraces mercy and humanity rather than fear and anger. His call for a rehabilitative approach to justice frames criminal justice reform as a moral and collective responsibility that demands public awareness and engagement.

Bryan A. Stevenson (Bio)

Bryan A. Stevenson is an American lawyer, social justice activist, and Aronson Family Professor of Criminal Justice at New York University School of Law, and the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. He is a graduate of Harvard, with both a master’s in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government and a JD from the School of Law. Stevenson has been representing capital defendants and death row prisoners in the deep south since 1985, when he was a staff attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia. He is also the author of the New York Times Bestseller Just Mercy

3. Davis, A. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories Press. 

Main Points and Narrative

• Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? critiques the prison system as not just flawed, but fundamentally unnecessary and counterproductive.
• She opens by contrasting public willingness to abolish the death penalty with the pervasive belief in the inevitability of prisons, aiming to shift how readers perceive incarceration: from a given to a challengeable, even eliminable, institution.
• She outlines how, from 1960 to 2003, the U.S. prison population ballooned from roughly 200,000 to over 2 million, making up 20 % of the world’s incarcerated population despite a far smaller population share.
• Davis exposes how prisons fail at reform, often perpetuating exploitation and racialized control rooted in slavery and reinforced by capitalism, and instead calls out the prison-industrial complex as a profit-driven, socially destructive system.
• Davis also addresses how gender shapes carceral realities, women are the fastest growing group in U.S. prisons, yet their experiences remain marginalized.
• She explores how punitive narratives cast women as “irrevocably fallen,” denying them redemption, and how prisons institutionalize state-sanctioned sexual violence and neglect for women’s health needs.

Contributions to Prison-Reform Advocacy

Davis’s work has been pivotal in reframing the conversation from reform to abolition. Her book became a foundational text for the prison‑abolition movement by challenging the assumption that prisons are indispensable. It emphasizes decarceration, restoration, and reallocation of resources, particularly toward housing, healthcare, education, and community-based solutions as meaningful alternatives to incarceration. Davis not only theorized abolition but also acted on it. She co-founded Critical Resistance in 1997 (following a 1998 conference), a grassroots organization that continues to mobilize against the prison-industrial complex at national and local levels. Her work helped inspire campaigns like New York City’s No New Jails, redirecting billions in potential prison spending toward community investments.

Hope for Change

Despite the bleakness of mass incarceration, Davis offers a compelling vision of abolition rooted in hope. She urges us to envision a future where prisons are as unthinkable as public executions once were, a meaningful social transformation rather than just partial reform. Her abolition is not destruction; it’s a constructive project: building systems of restorative and transformative justice that are grounded in care, equity, and community safety, not punishment. By recentering care, encompassing health, education, support, and social belonging, over confinement, Davis instills a radical yet tangible hope: to dismantle oppressive systems and build humane alternatives that affirm life, not negate it.

Angela Y. Davis (Bio)

Angela Yvonne Davis is an American feminist, political activist, philosopher, academic, and author; she is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Departments of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. She is internationally recognized for her ongoing efforts to combat all forms of oppression in the U.S. and abroad.

4. Bernstein, R. (2024). Freeman’s challenge: The murder that shook America’s original prison for profit. University of Chicago Press. 

Main Points and Narratives

• Bernstein reconstructs the life of William Freeman, a free Black teenager imprisoned at Auburn State Prison in 1840, and the 1846 murders that followed his brutal incarceration, using them to expose how the North pioneered profit-driven imprisonment decades before the Thirteenth Amendment’s “except as punishment for crime” clause.
• Set against the Auburn system’s regimented, for-profit labor regime, the book shows how Freeman’s abuse, mental deterioration, and sensationalized trial helped entrench the racialized myth of inherent Black criminality.
• Bernstein’s narrative, grounded in extensive archival research and visual materials, situates Auburn as an early hub of carceral capitalism and a civic economy that profited from prisoners’ labor and even prison tourism.

Contributions to Prison-Reform Advocacy

As a contribution to prison-reform and abolitionist scholarship, the book forcefully links incarceration, racial capitalism, and public culture, clarifying that “prison for profit” was not a Southern post-war invention but a Northern antebellum one. Bernstein places Freeman alongside Black activists, including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, who crafted strategies of resistance within a city “dominated by a citadel of unfreedom,” while also engaging contemporary abolitionist theory (e.g., Angela Y. Davis) to connect nineteenth-century practices to present-day carceral logics. Reviewers highlight the study’s meticulous documentation (nearly 70 pages of endnotes) and its value for understanding how sensational media and local economies normalized punitive labor and surveillance.

Hope for Change

Bernstein ultimately offers grounds for hope by recovering historical challenges to carceral profit, especially Freeman’s insistence on the dignity and value of his labor, and by illuminating traditions of Black organizing that modeled resilience, legal advocacy, and narrative counter-power. By exposing the deep roots of pay-to-punish schemes and their cultural scaffolding, the book equips reformers and educators with a usable past for today’s movements: to question profit incentives in punishment, to humanize those harmed by prisons, and to imagine non-carceral responses to harm. In this way, Freeman’s Challenge becomes not just a case study in historical injustice but a tool for contemporary policy critique and abolitionist futures.

Robin Bernstein (Bio)

Robin Bernstein is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies, as well as of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her research explores race through multiple interdisciplinary lenses, including childhood, theatre, and performance studies. Bernstein also serves as the chair of Harvard’s doctoral program in American Studies.

 5. Friedman, B. (2025). Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons. University of North Carolina Press.

Main Points

• Brittany Friedman introduces and conceptualizes the notion of “carceral apartheid,” describing it as a systemic strategy through which state institutions, including police, courts, prisons, and surveillance systems, serve to govern radicalized populations via mechanisms of segregation, suppression, and decimation.
• Drawing primarily on California’s prison system from the 1950s onward, she documents how officials waged a campaign against incarcerated Black political activists, deploying segregation, covert control techniques, and alliances with white supremacists to undermine Black radical movements.
• Friedman’s methodology involves original interviews with the founders of Black political groups like the Black Guerilla Family, conversations with imprisoned white supremacists, and deep archival research, illustrating how domestic state violence mirrors and reinforces patterns of genocide, imprisonment, and torture abroad.

Contributions to Prison Reform Advocacy

Friedman’s work reframes mass incarceration not merely as a criminal justice issue but as a deliberate extension of racialized political repression, rooted in white supremacist and imperial motives. By naming and unpacking “carceral apartheid,” she provides prison reform advocates with a powerful analytic lens, one that underscores institutional racism, political warfare, and ideological control as foundational to the prison-industrial complex. Her evidence-based approach, combining lived testimony and archival data, challenges reformers to confront not just punitive policies but the deep-seated ideological structures that sustain them. Reviewers highlight the book’s clarity and urgency in exposing entrenched white supremacy, alongside its documentation of Black liberation efforts within prisons, a dual focus that strengthens the intellectual and moral foundations of prison reform discourse.

Hope for Change

Despite confronting a deeply oppressive system, Friedman’s narrative also embeds possibilities for resistance and transformation. While many passages describe coercion and collusion, her recounting of Black liberation organizing within prisons reveals enduring agency, solidarity, and resilience, reminding us that even deeply repressive carceral structures can be sites of radical opposition and hope. The clarity of her diagnosis, the identification of white supremacist intent and deception as core pillars of mass incarceration, also offers a roadmap: dismantling carceral apartheid will require challenging not just laws and practices but the underlying ideologies and lies that sustain them. This presents an urgent imperative and a potential strategy for advocates seeking fundamental, not cosmetic, reform.

Brittany Friedman (Bio)

Dr. Brittany Friedman is a sociologist and cultural and political theorist whose research examines cover-ups, institutional politics, and the hidden mechanisms of power. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University and serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California, where she received the 2024 Raubenheimer Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. A 2023–2024 American Association of University Women Faculty Postdoctoral Fellow and an Affiliated Scholar at the American Bar Foundation, Dr. Friedman is also a member of the inaugural cohort of Policy Outreach Fellows of the American Sociological Association for 2025–2026.

A Reaction Thought Piece to the Books

Looking across the powerful works of Alexander, Stevenson, Davis, Bernstein, and Friedman, one theme stands out with urgency: prison reform is not merely a question of adjusting laws or improving conditions, but a deeper reckoning with the racialized, profit-driven, and dehumanizing structures at the heart of the U.S. criminal justice system. These authors collectively show that incarceration is not an isolated response to crime but a vast social and political project, one that disproportionately targets marginalized communities, entrenches inequality, and sustains itself through narratives of fear and racial control. From Alexander’s framing of mass incarceration as a “new Jim Crow” to Friedman’s concept of “carceral apartheid,” the readings make clear that prisons are not neutral institutions but engines of systemic injustice.

What strikes me equally is the sense of resilience and hope running through these works. Stevenson’s stories of redemption, Davis’s vision of abolition, Bernstein’s recovery of historical resistance, and Friedman’s documentation of radical organizing within prisons all point toward the same truth: systems built on exclusion and oppression can be dismantled, and alternatives grounded in compassion, restoration, and community are both necessary and possible. Yet, as Harriet Tubman’s life reminds us, systems of oppression can be challenged and overcome. Just as she defied the structures of slavery and built pathways to freedom, today’s prison reform and abolition movements invite us to re-imagine justice itself.

These perspectives challenge us not only to confront the injustices of mass incarceration but also to imagine what true justice might look like, one rooted in dignity, equity, and care rather than punishment and profit. In this way, prison reform advocacy becomes not only about policy change but about transforming our collective moral imagination.

Research and Thought piece by Jerome Nenger, Graduate Assistant, Harriet Tubman Center, PhD. Candidate - Community Research and Action, 2025.