Michelle Alexander on California’s ‘Cruel and Unusual’ Prisons | The Nation

Michelle Alexander, a former ACLU lawyer in the Bay Area and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, has pointed out that the rush to incarcerate has gotten so out of control that “if our nation were to return to the rates of incarceration we had in the 1970s, we would have to release four out of five people behind bars.”

Liliana Segura via The Nation.