"Talitha LeFlouria has written a brilliant and original book. She has dared to courageously uncover the past and tell the truth about this nation's cruel history of incarcerating Black women, revealing that mass incarceration did not begin with the War on Drugs but with slavery. Searching for Jane Crow makes us grapple with the fact that little has changed through the centuries. This book is must-read." --Susan Burton, author of the NAACP Image Award-winner Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women "By searching for Jane Crow, Talitha LeFlouria finds the deep roots of an American 'prison nation,' one that still daily condemns Black women to fates that should shock the conscience. 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, side by side. The reader who does so will be changed.

" --W. Caleb McDaniel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America " Searching for Jane Crow is an eloquent, long-overdue corrective to the many histories of mass incarceration in America that relegate Black women to the margins. 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." --Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South "Talitha L. LeFlouria delivers a paradigm-shifting account of American incarceration, tracing its roots to the domestic slave trade and the long history of racialized confinement that has shaped Black women's lives for centuries. With extraordinary archival rigor and narrative power, she reveals mass incarceration not as a modern aberration but as a central throughline of our nation's history. This book ought to change forever how the history of mass incarceration is told.

" --Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness "Deeply researched and profoundly moving, Searching for Jane Crow is a trailblazing work that lays bare the long, painful history of the criminalization and incarceration of Black women and girls, tracing a system rooted in slavery that continues to shape American life today." --Dr. Sydney McKinney, executive director of the National Black Women's Justice Institute.