The history of the United States is a history of struggle for civil rights. To the country’s great shame, the early declaration that “all men are created equal” was immediately qualified to exclude more than half of the country’s small population. Even as access to citizenship and the vote expanded, the systems of protection and punishment/rehabilitation implemented have been unevenly enforced. This reading list highlights some of the studies examining that gross inequality of justice along predominately racial lines focusing on the criminalization of blackness across the United States after the Second World War. The list combines a selection of recent studies examining the contemporary system of institutional inequality and its historical development alongside a few of the seminal theoretical works that shaped our current discourse.
