REVIEWS The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in

Alexander examines the legal and social framework that supports the regime of mass incarceration of black men in the Unit-ed States. As Alexander carefully recounts, beginning in the early 1980s with President Reagan’s declaration of a ‘‘War on Drugs,’’ a number of policy initiatives, Supreme Court decisions, and vested interests, aided and abetted by political divisiveness and public apathy, coalesced to create the social, legal, and political environment that has sup-ported mass incarceration ever since. Alexander’s analysis reveals disturbing par-allels between the racial caste systems of slavery, Jim Crow, and today’s mass incarcer