new jersey prisons ban michelle alexander’s “the new jim crow” because it hits too close to home

According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander’s award-winning critique of the prison industrial complex, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, appears on a list of books banned by some prisons in New Jersey.

Per the Guardian, the ACLU, which obtained the lists in response to a public records request, called for the ban to be lifted in a letter sent to Gary Lanigan, New Jersey’s corrections commissioner, claiming it violated the rights of inmates under the first amendment to the US constitution.

“For the state burdened with this systemic injustice to prohibit prisoners from reading a book about race and mass incarceration is grossly ironic, misguided, and harmful,” Tess Borden, an ACLU staff attorney, said in the letter.

“Michelle Alexander’s book chronicles how people of color are not just locked in, but locked out of civic life, and New Jersey has exiled them even further by banning this text specifically for them,” said ACLU-NJ Executive Director Amol Sinha in a follow up statement. “The ratios and percentages of mass incarceration play out in terms of human lives. Keeping a book that examines a national tragedy out of the hands of the people mired within it adds insult to injury.”

That New Jersey would be the state to do this is no surprise. As the Intercept reports, the state continues to lead the nation in the racial disparity between Black and white inmates. “While the disparity nationwide remains large, with African-Americans having a national average of a 5 to 1 incarceration rate to that of whites, in New Jersey the rate was more than double the national average, ballooning up to an outrageous 12 to 1 ratio,” Intercept writer Shaun King explains. “What that effectively means is that African-Americans make up less than 15 percent of New Jersey’s overall population, but represent a staggering 60 percent of the state’s prisoners.”

Alexander told the Guardian in an email that this ban falls in line with the horrors of the criminal justice system.

“Those who run our prisons and jails seem determined to keep those who are locked up and locked out as ignorant as possible about the racial, social, and political forces that have turned this country into the most punitive nation on earth,” she said. “There’s no reasonable explanation for this save one: prison officials must fear what would happen if people fully understood how biased and corrupt our so-called justice system actually is.”