New Book
Searching for Jane Crow
For more than two centuries, Black women in America have been subjected to staggering rates of arrest, conviction, and incarceration—yet their stories have too often been eclipsed by those of Black men. In Searching for Jane Crow, historian Talitha L. LeFlouria offers a vital correction, placing Black women at the center of the nation’s long carceral history. Noting that “cotton, not crack, was the primary driver of mass incarceration during its earliest years,” she reveals how the architecture of today’s punitive system was designed to safeguard slavery and the profits it generated—a two-hundred-year legacy that remains deeply entrenched.
The present-day mass incarceration of Black women can be traced to the expansion of the War on Drugs in the 1980s and 1990s. However, as this book argues, the crisis of imprisonment for Black women goes back much further, with its origins in slavery. Exploring these historical roots helps situate the War on Drugs as the final chapter in this history, not the first.
Searching for Jane Crow
Booklist
Booklist
“An incisive and radical argument.”
Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly
“[E]ye-opening . . . [A] damning look at the racialized nature of the US prison system.”
Michelle Alexander
Author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
“A paradigm-shifting account of American incarceration… This book ought to change forever how the history of mass incarceration is told.”
Susan Burton
Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women
“A brilliant and original book . . . revealing that mass incarceration did not begin with the War on Drugs but with slavery… A must-read.”
Dr. Sydney McKinney
Executive director of the National Black Women’s Justice Institute
“Deeply researched and profoundly moving… A trailblazing work.”
David Ayala
Executive director of the Formerly Incarcerated, Convicted People & Families Movement
“Searching for Jane Crow is a powerful, truth telling account that centers Black women too often erased from conversations on incarceration. Talitha L. LeFlouria exposes the legacy of punishment and profit, calling us to build systems rooted in dignity, equity, and freedom for all.”
W. Caleb McDaniel
Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America
“…Like the early abolitionists who confronted the public with stories about American slavery as it was, LeFlouria urges us to look, without flinching, at incarcerations then and now…The reader who does so will be changed.”
Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Author of Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge
“With a passionate pen and a thorough mining of the archive, LeFlouria reshapes the terrain of carceral studies… A powerful and purposeful must-read.”
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
An eloquent, long-overdue corrective…If you yearn to understand how our penal system became what it is today and where Black women fit in that story, this is the book for you.”
LeFlouria's work brings historical depth to urgent conversations about gender, race, and justice.
