Staff Book Recommendations: Earnest Offley
My first recommendation is a book: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, which talks about mass incarceration and the school to prison pipeline. My other recommendation is a documentary, actually: Ava Duvernay’s 13th is a must-see. I honestly had no idea how in-depth the prison system was from an education standpoint in minority communities. At one point, there was a formula that identified how many kids in kindergarten 
in certain communities would end up in prison, and this formula informed how many prisons they built. I didn’t know about how private prisons use prisoners to perform essentially slave labor jobs; 13th describes the evolution from slavery to chain gangs to mass incarceration. For those of you that don’t have time to read, take the time to watch this documentary.
