The book described here sounds like it will be an interesting read — and an important corrective to some lazy thinking about race and crime.

Scholars and activists had rallied to help the prison population, Fortner felt, highlighting racism in a criminal-justice system that maintains an incarceration rate five to 10 times greater than other liberal democracies and locks up African-Americans at almost six times the rate of whites. But, as he saw it, that scholarship discounted the experience of working- and middle-class black people who cope with the consequences of drugs and crime. It overlooked the power of their activism. It obscured the important role they played in bringing about mass incarceration.