At first, as others have mentioned, I thought that the reading would be giving crazy ideas that couldn’t possibly true in America today. Sure, not everyone is treated completely equally, but to say that racial prejudice is as bad as it has been seemed to be an exaggeration. This is why I found it interesting that the author actually, in a sense, proves herself to us in the beginning of the reading, explaining that she is a civil rights lawyer, who at first thought it was a ridiculous claim as well. By taking us through her “journey” of discovering how bad the incarceration problem is in America, the author allows the reader to not only trust her more, but also feel more involved in the reading, and want to help solve the problem just as she would like to do. She even says herself in the introduction that “for some, the characterization of mass incarceration as a ‘racial caste system’ may seem like a gross exaggeration (12)”.
I am appalled by the statistics that we are given about how many people are incarcerated in the US, especially African Americans, and how that compares with the crime rates, and with incarceration in other countries. As a whole society, are we really as bad as we were with Jim Crow. Are we even worse? It is frightening to even entertain the idea that we might be better off without prisons. I wonder what kind of effect that would have on our crime rates! However, we definitely need to think about what we can do to solve these problems that exist in our society, which are somewhat hidden and often overlooked.
