After he loses his job, and especially after a very possessive former lover reappears, his demise takes on a horrible inevitability. But there are many secrets he never reveals. My number is my name.” At prison he overcomes his stammer, converts to Islam, earns a dollar a day as a member of a prison crew tackling the California fire siege of 2003 that blazed across 800,000 acres. When they want to know anything about me they do not type my last name in the computer but it is my number that is inputted. Allen quotes from his letters and reproduces in full a startling essay he wrote from prison in which he likens his conditions to Dante’s Inferno: “To the state of California I am not Michael Alexander Allen but I am K-10033. Moving memories … Allen captures the normalcy of Michael’s childhood. He was tried as an adult, jailed for 13 years, released at the age of 26 – and murdered three years later. Cuz is a memoir about her younger cousin Michael who grew up in Los Angeles where, at the age of 15, he was arrested for a botched carjacking. They are also questions sort of addressed by Danielle Allen, a classicist and political scientist by training, who teaches at Harvard and has also served as an adviser to the Labour party in the UK. These are questions asked by many contemporary black American writers – among them Jesmyn Ward in Men We Reaped (2013) and Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me (2015). But what if, legal scholar Michelle Alexander asked in her 2010 bestseller The New Jim Crow, mass incarceration was actually a success? Can it be an accident that “huge segments of ghetto communities are permanently relegated to a second-class status, disenfranchised and subjected to perpetual surveillance and monitoring by law enforcement agencies”? Normally this is seen as a national calamity. That number has quadrupled in recent decades.

I t’s both known and yet not known enough that the US imprisons more of its population than any other country on the planet.

Cuz by Danielle S. Allen