The most recent education news provides alarming indications that the "pipeline" from early childhood neglect to young adult incarceration is disappearing. I don't suggest that the problem is going away. Quite to the contrary.

The recent, ongoing community uproar in Anaheim, CA over two police slayings of Latino males in one weekend -- and the subsequent police reaction to that outrage -- illustrates the terrifying ineffectiveness of a militarized approach to conflict.

A black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime and a Latino boy a one in six chance of the same fate. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world: 7.1 million adult residents -- one in 33 -- are under some form of correctional supervision including prison, jail, probation, or parole. Michelle Alexander writes in her bestselling book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness that there are more adult African Americans under correctional control today than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. In 2011, our state and federal prison population exceeded that of the top 35 European nations combined. Something's very wrong with this picture.

In some ways, current politics mimic the reaction against democracy at the twentieth century's turn, when Jim Crow segregation entrenched itself in the southern states.

Is our Criminal Justice system really just a way to keep large numbers of African-Americans out of mainstream society, like we did under Jim Crow?

I've been reading, talking, and thinking a lot about justice lately. And the deeper I get into it, the more evident it is that our justice system i...

Where have all the black men gone? Michelle Alexander, in her recently released book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, answers the question head on.