(BET) — Are there more Black men now in prison than there were in slavery? That’s what Ohio State Law Professor Michelle Alexander has been saying. In her book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” Alexander argues that prisons have become the latest form of economic and social disenfranchisement, but in a talk to theAmerican Civil Liberties Union, she expressed how prison can be compared to a part of history very familiar to the ancestry of African-Americans: slavery. “More African-American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” she said at the talk.
