Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling was an accidental find at the library, but I'm game for any graphic novel that has Michelle Alexander's name attached to it. (She wrote the book's foreward.) While I was not familiar with Marc Mauer's original book Race to Incarcerate, first published in 1999 (I think), I'm happy to see it being added to the (short) list of nonfiction, "academic" texts being converted to graphic novel form. (Bill Ayers and Ryan Alexander-Tanner's To Teach: The Journey, in Comics comes to mind as another example.) Just as Alexander notes in her foreward, this new form offers a wonderful context through which to share important information with audiences who probably wouldn't have engaged it in its earlier iteration.
That said, the flow of the book is not perfect. There are moments where greater depth would have brought greater understanding. And, as a nerd, there are times when having references and citations (in some unobtrusive way) would have been really valuable to me as a reader. Even so, the text does a wonderful job of personalizing the prison complex in the States. Stories of real people -- like that of Kemba Smith -- are incredibly meaningful and help make legal policy and practice "real" through the lives and stories of people it has affected (usually in a negative way). The text is a call to change (though I found Mauer's introduction pulled away from the charge that continued change is needed).
There were a number of things I found particularly striking in the text. While I knew the generalities, having concrete numbers made a difference to me. Here are a few things that struck me:
-- "The U.S. rate of incarceration is the highest in the world." The U.S. has 730 prisoners for every 100,000 citizens. France, Germany, and Japan all have fewer than 100. Iran has 350. (p. 3)
-- U.S. drug policy has clear consequences on the population as a result of mandatory sentencing requirements, the inequitable application of the law on various populations, and so on. (For example, you're more likely to be imprisoned if you're poor and/or of color, in part because you have less access to drug abuse prevention and treatment programs, community resources, advocacy resources, health insurance, etc.) (p. 12+)
-- "Many whites failed to distinguish [between] riot, protest, [and] crime, lumping it all together as: 'Crime in the streets.'" (p.28) - I think this is still true, but the implications silence voices who want change and villainize those who speak up anyway. Dangerous stuff.
-- "Between 1980 and 1993, federal spending on employment and training programs had been cut nearly in half. Spending on corrections had gone up by 521%." (p. 47) As a teacher who KNOWS the power of education (and other community resources) to prevent crime, this is infuriating to me.
-- "One out of three African American boys born in 2001 can expect to spend time in prison. Nearly 40% of all prisoners are African American, and 20% are Latino, far out of proportion to their numbers in the general population. 'If we started to put White America in jail at the same rate we're putting Black America in jail, I wonder whether our collective feelings would be the same, or would we be putting pressure on the President and our elected officials not to lock up America but to save America?' - former Atlanta police chief Eldrin Bell" (p. 81)
-- "African Americans make up 13% of the population, 21% of drug arrests in 1980, [and] 36% of drug arrests in 1992, [but] Blacks and Whites have about the same rate of drug use." (p. 91)