My first thought upon reading through the Introduction and first chapter of this book was that this is a subject matter that people are afraid to discuss. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 seemed to be the ultimate achievement for an oppressed class, the fact that an African-American took the highest office in the most powerful country in the world, finally erased the boundary between blacks and whites. Well, It didn’t.

Mass incarceration, to be quite honest, isn’t good for anyone. First, it encourages racial profiling and discriminatory sentencing, and second, the cost of this large-scale incarceration puts a further strain on the economy, while not effectively inhibiting crime. My question is: how can we change the justice system to make it do its job in both an equal and effective way?