To the Editor

During the week of April 7-13 I was able to participate in what for me was a new kind of civic project — a “Read-Out”. A Read-Out is a public educational program centered on the examination of a particularly stimulating book. In this instance the book was The New Jim Crow by the legal scholar Michelle Alexander. Professor Alexander’s subtitle identifies her principal subject: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Her book draws out some of the human realities behind the mind-numbing statistics of American penology, particularly as they relate to race. I never dreamed that America, with a twentieth of the world’s population, has a quarter of the world’s prisoners. I was startled and shamed to learn that a young American black has about a one-in-three chance of doing prison time at some point.

The venue for the event, which took place for an hour each evening between 5 and 6 p.m., was the Hinds Plaza on Witherspoon Street. The Read-Out had no official connection with Princeton’s remarkable public library, but it was highly appropriate that such a public education program should take place on the library’s doorstep. The Read-Out harmoniously shared the space with the plaza’s regular coffee-sippers and hangers-out. Each hour-long segment included a selected reading from The New Jim Crow, brief and informative talks by people familiar with issues raised by Prof. Alexander, and some thematically appropriate music and poetry. On the week’s one rainy evening, the program enjoyed the hospitality of Labyrinth Books’ basement reading room. To all my civic-minded fellow Princetonians who planned and executed this excellent Read-Out I want to express my warm thanks.

John V. Fleming

Hartley Avenue