The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Public housing projects as well as private landlords are free to deny housing to people with criminal records. In fact, you don't even have to be convicted. You can be denied housing - or your family evicted - just based on an arrest.

Discrimination in public benefits is also perfectly legal. Under federal law, people convicted of drug felonies are deemed ineligible even for food stamps.

The United States does have the highest rate of incarceration in the world dwarfing the rates of even highly repressive regimes like Russia, China or Iran. This reflects a radical shift in criminal justice policy, a stunning development that virtually no one - not even the best criminologists - predicted forty years ago.

People on probation and parole are typically denied the right to vote, and in eleven states people are denied the right to vote even after completion of their sentences.

I say we haven't ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

Most criminologists today will acknowledge that crime rates and incarceration rates in the United States have had relatively little to do with each other.