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Preface and Introduction

• In her nonfiction book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, author and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander explores the impacts of America’s War on Drugs and system of mass incarceration as a means of racial oppression and the development of a second-class population of citizens who are barred from the freedoms and rights of democracy.

• In the Introduction, Michelle Alexander compares the circumstances of Jarvious Cotton, a felon on parole, with the circumstances of Cotton’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.

• None of these men have been able to vote for different reasons: Jarvious has had his right to vote stripped by the criminal justice system; his father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests; his grandfather was prevented by Ku Klux Klan intimidation; and his great-grandfather was barred because he was a slave.

• Alexander ties these...

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