Chokehold: Policing Black Men [Paperback]

Finalist for the 2018 National Council on Crime & Delinquencys Media for a Just Society Awards

Nominated for the 49th NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Nonfiction)

A 2017Washington PostNotable Book

AKirkusBest Book of 2017

“Butler has hit his stride. This is a meditation, a sonnet, a legal brief, a poetry slam and a dissertation that represents the full bloom of his early thesis: The justice system does not work for blacks, particularly black men.”
—The Washington Post

“The most readable and provocative account of the consequences of the war on drugs since Michelle AlexandersThe New Jim Crow. . . .”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Powerful . . . deeply informed from a legal standpoint and yet in some ways still highly personal”
—The Times Literary Supplement(London)

With the eloquence of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the persuasive research of Michelle Alexander, a former federal prosecutor explains how the system really works, and how to disrupt it

Cops, politicians, and ordinary people are afraid of black men. The result is the Chokehold: laws and practices that treat every African American man like a thug. In this explosive new book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it’s supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread—all with the support of judges and politicians.

In his no-holds-barred style, Butler, whose scholarship has been featured on60 Minutes, uses new data to demonstrate that white men commit the majority of violent crime in the United States. For example, a white woman is ten times more likely to be raped by a white male acquaintance than be the victim of a violent crime perpetrated by a black man. Butler also frankly discusses the prls4