On my way to the prison, I’d been listening to the audiobook of Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow, I told him, the seminal book on mass incarceration that likens the War on Drugs to a system of racial control comparable to slavery and Jim Crow. “I’ve read The New Jim Crow twice,” Ronnie said. He’d also read lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s majestic Just Mercy, a memoir about his work against the racial bias and economic inequities inherent in the criminal justice system, which included efforts on behalf of falsely accused death row inmates. “It had me crying when I read it,” he said. These books we
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