A capacity crowd gathered on April 11 to discuss Michelle Alexander’s award-winning book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
The lively and thought-provoking discussion covered a wide range of topics, including the war on drugs and its impact on the criminal justice system, the social cost of incarceration, and the rise of the prison-industrial complex. Click here to read a summary of the event. Additional resources on these issues are listed below.
Many thanks to all who attended the spring 2019 book discussion and to our host, Many Hands member Lydia Marshall, and moderators, Candice Jones, President and CEO of the Public Welfare Foundation, and Jill Rosenbaum Meyer, a television news and documentary producer and member of the Many Hands board.
Many Hands book discussions are open to all. For those who came as a guest of a Many Hands member, thank you for joining our discussion. If you would like to learn more about our work and how you can join us in our 2019 grantmaking, please click here. As a Many Hands member, you will receive an invitation to attend the Annual Meeting to be held on May 16 and a vote to determine the 2019 $100,000 grant recipient.
Additional Resources
- Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair
- Patrick Sharkey, Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence
- Heroin and the War on Drugs – In the 1970s and 1980s, frustration over heroin and related, urban crime led to the “War on Drugs.” Today, opiate abuse is back. But the users, and the response, are very different. In this short (14 minutes) documentary from 2015, Retro Report and The New York Times unpack how our system reacted to different drug users then, and now.
- How Incarcerated Parents Are Losing Their Children Forever – Being stripped of parental rights while in prison, even for minor crimes, is “the family separation crisis that no one knows about,” as reported in this video produced by the Marshall Project in partnership with The Washington Post.
