Alamosa Public Library

Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New...

"America likes to tell itself that it inhabits a postracial world, yet nearly every empirical measure-wealth, unemployment, incarceration, school segregation-reveals that racial inequality has barely improved since 1968, when Richard Nixon became our first zlaw and ordery president. Hayes contends our country has fractured in two: the Colony and the Nation. In the Nation, we venerate the law. In the Colony, we obsess over order, fear trumps civil...

Featuring five famous trials, this book examines the way an individual's right to a fair trial can be threatened when people are tempted to abandon their principles in the name of safety.

"Launching a propulsive middle grade nonfiction series, a young woman shares her harrowing experience of being wrongly accused of terrorism. Adama Bah grew up in East Harlem after immigrating from Conakry, Guinea, and was deeply connected to her community and the people who lived there. But as a thirteen-year-old after the events of September 11, 2001, she began experiencing discrimination and dehumanization as prejudice toward Muslim people grew....

Examines issues of police brutality, corruption, and racial bias against a historical backdrop of police culture.

Publisher's description: In recent years, America's criminal justice system has become the subject of an increasingly urgent debate. Critics have assailed the rise of mass incarceration, emphasizing its disproportionate impact on people of color. As [law professor] James Forman Jr. points out, however, the war on crime that began in the 1970s was supported by many African Americans in the nation's urban centers. In Locking Up Our Own, he seeks to...

"In Stakes Is High, Smith exposes the contradictions at the heart of American life--between patriotism and justice, between freedom and inequality, incarceration, police violence. In a series of incisive essays, Smith holds us to account individually and as a nation. He examines his own shortcomings, grapples with the anxiety of feeling stuck, and looks in new directions for the tools to build a just America. He questions whether Martin Luther King,...

"Drawing upon 25 years of experience representing black youth in Washington D.C.'s juvenile court, Kris Henning confronts America's irrational, manufactured fears of Black youth and makes a powerfully compelling case that the crisis in racist American policing begins with its relationship to Black children. She explains how discriminatory and aggressive policing has socialized a generation of Black teenagers to fear, resent, and resist the police,...

"He was seventeen when an all-white jury sentenced him to prison for a crime he didn't commit. Now, in this unforgettable memoir, a pioneering lawyer recalls the journey that led to his exoneration-and inspired him to devote his life to fighting the manyinjustices in our legal system. Seventeen years old and facing nearly thirty years behind bars, Jarrett Adams sought to figure out the why behind his fate. Sustained by his mother and aunts who brought...

The founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, recounts his experiences as a lawyer working to assist those desperately in need, reflecting on his pursuit of the ideal of compassion in American justice