Since its founding over twenty-five years ago, The New Press has become a leading publisher of criminal justice reform books. Early groundbreaking works include Marc Mauer’s Race to Incarcerateand David Cole’s No Equal Justice, both published in 1999. In 2010 The New Press published The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, which won numerous awards including an NAACP Image Award and is currently in its tenth year on The New York Times bestseller list; that book is widely credited with catalyzing the current criminal justice reform movement. Recent publications include Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis’s The Meaning of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences (December 2018), calling for a twenty-year cap on all prison sentences, as part of a campaign run by The Sentencing Project, where Mauer is executive director; and Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair (March 2019) by Common Justice executive director Danielle Sered, which was the subject of a March 3 op-ed by Michelle Alexander in The New York Times. Sered’s book was also made possible, in part, by a generous grant of $25,000 from the Public Welfare Foundation.

Future projects to be underwritten by these new grants include:

• The New Jim Crow: Young Readers’ Edition by Michelle Alexander and adapted by Rebecca Stefoff
• Sing a Rhythm, Dance a Blues: Education for the Liberation of Black and Brown Girls, on creating non-punitive environments for girls of color, and Bars, a young adult graphic novel, both by Monique W. Morris
• Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System by Civil Rights Corp executive director Alec Karakatsanis
• The Fourth: From Stop and Frisk to Shoot and Kill by award-winning UCLA law professor Devon W. Carbado, on how the Fourth Amendment has been interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court to protect police officers rather than regular citizens
• A historical guide to the Indiana Women’s Prison, written by incarcerated women and edited by Art for Justice fellow Michelle Jones
• American Epidemic: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Opioid Crisis, a collection of the best journalism about the current crisis, underscoring the way our criminalization of drug addiction and lack of a health care frame have ballooned the jail population, edited by John McMillian;
• Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants by law professor and founder of the blog Crimmigration.com César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández
• What We Know, reform ideas from currently and previously incarcerated people, edited by the Reverend Vivian Nixon, executive director of College and Community Fellowship, and Daryl Atkinson, co-director of Forward Justice, and published in conjunction with the Center for American Progress
• Your Home Is Your Prison by Truthout editor-in-chief Maya Schenwar and award-winning writer Victoria Law, on the expansion of the carceral state

New Press executive director Diane Wachtell, who is also the editor of The New Press’s criminal justice publishing program, notes that “New Press books are intended to leverage social change. We hope that our criminal justice publishing program offers practical ideas as well as intellectual scaffolding for the reform movement. While there has been support for this program and these books since our founding, The New Press has never received such a significant amount of funding at one time for our criminal justice work. The current grants are a testament to the incredible work being done by our authors and others in this field, and they will allow us to continue to make the best thinking in the field available and accessible to a wide national audience.”

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