ARC provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
This book was well written and made easy to understand for a younger audience.

We can be lead to believe by our history books that racism is over, that the Emancipation Proclamation immediately ended slavery. This book endeavors to show us otherwise. Lewis discusses the prison industrial complex and how Jim Crow laws contributed to the modern system. Now, all we get here is a very brief overview. This makes it accessible to reluctant readers but paints an incomplete picture. For instance, the only examples of Jim Crow laws we get are segregation in bus seating and schools. Even so, it encourages kids to think critically and question the corruption in our system which makes this inherently valuable.

While The New Jim Crow has been a pivotal and informative book for young adults and adults, it can be difficult to explain the intricacies and legacy of incarceration in the United States. And then there is this book, an important addition to elementary and middle grade classrooms, while still being accessible to high school readers looking for a cursory overview of the topic.

The introduction is very direct, “many do not have a Hollywood ending”, and stating that “Black men have the highest incarceration rate of any group in the US”, before providing a very clear graphic comparing the rate of imprisonment between genders and race. I think it is important that the author chose to make this argument about the incarceration of black men from the beginning, rather than focusing on prison in general. Children and students need to be pushed to question what they see and hear in the news, and this book gives one point that they can come back to to explore various ideas (ex. Learning more about Reconstruction, Juneteenth, Nixon’s War on Drugs). This book is easy in terms of Lexile, but the content is challenging, yet still ending on a hopeful note.

This book as appropriately written for young readers to learn about incarceration and things that have been going on in everyday world. It is sensitive but written in a real context that doesn't sugar anything.