The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow is a jarring, intricate look into one of the most urgent human rights crises of our time: mass incarceration. A former American Civil Liberties Union attorney and current professor of law at Ohio State University, Alexander takes on the role of scholar-insurgent in The New Jim Crow and argues for nothing less than a full interrogation of what she sees as the most "damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement" (11). This "backlash," according to Alexander--generally understood in civil rights history common sense as the rise of a New Right--is much more insidious, racist, and systematic than previously thought. Mass incarceration, she argues, is a "tightly networked system of laws, policies, [and] institutions" that looks eerily similar to life under Jim Crow and even slavery (13). Those caught in the crosshairs of this system of (racial) social control suffer life-long, legal discrimination in housing, welfare, suffrage, employment, and health care--all of which lead to a "closed circuit of perpetual marginality" (181). Such marginality has several causes, yet she sees colorblind racial indifference and the War on Drugs as the two biggest culprits in the creation of yet another permanent racial under-caste. To make her case, Alexander pounds readers with facts, statistics, and Supreme Court rulings--the fact that "as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records" as one of many gut-checks (7). In short, Alexander's The New Jim Crow lays bare the troubling, racist realities of the American criminal justice system. And yet, maybe due to the severity of her topic, Alexander makes occasional leaps in logic, oversimplifies at times, and even lets the pathos of the subject matter cloud her conclusions. Nevertheless, her arguments are mostly sound and ultimately make the case for a desperately needed shift in public discourse and civil rights advocacy to address the "human rights nightmare" that is mass incarceration (15). One of the most convincing parts of The New Jim Crow is the chapter entitled "The Lockdown." With powerful detail, Alexander takes readers step-by-step along the criminal justice chain to expose how the racist War on Drugs is waged. What she calls the "Rules of the Game," Alexander convincingly argues that the War on Drugs depends upon the erosion of Fourth Amendment rights--rights that protect privacy of person and property. Alexander threads the Supreme Court decisions of California v. Acevedo, Terry v. Ohio, and Florida v. Bostick to show that police tactics such as stop-and-frisk are protected by Supreme Court rulings. This point is not to be taken lightly, for it leads readers to understand that the state is absolutely complicit in both freeing police to round up whomever they want as well as tie the hands of citizens seeking legal recourse against discriminatory policing. This dynamic of racist state-based control, Alexander reveals, gets worse and worse as those arrested are hamstrung by unchecked prosecutorial powers, grossly inadequate public representation, mandatory minimum sentences, and perpetual "correctional supervision" if labeled felons (92). Readers are left wondering how such injustice can go on in a supposedly democratic society. Alexander is at her best here, implicating the entire institution of American justice in fewer than 50 pages. Alexander's arguments in parts of other chapters, however, lack precision and evidence. In Chapter 4, Alexander writes: "If we actually learned to show love...and concern across racial lines during the Civil Rights Movement--rather than go colorblind--mass incarceration would not exist today" (172). Although a belief in cross-racial "love" and solidarity seems like it would remedy racial inequalities and, in a clear reach, mass incarceration, Alexander's argument is regrettably naïve here. For one, as she demonstrates pages earlier in the same chapter, civil rights leaders and everyday folk acknowledging race or "blackness" is not something that can be easily remedied with simple effort or even love. Rather, unconscious and conscious racism is difficult to out and defeat--with the 1995 study in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education in Chapter 3 as one of her many examples (107). While it is helpful to recognize that racism works at the unconscious level, it's unfair to argue that such "pre-thought" racism will go away with simple love and concern. Mass incarceration, without question, is part and parcel of a larger history of black criminalization and the racist political economy that is the US criminal justice system. In the above quote, it seems like Alexander is lost in the pathos of her subject and ignores her very own arguments from pages earlier. What is also problematic is Alexander's assumption that love "across racial lines" was absent during the Civil Rights Movement. Aside from the fact that she provides no evidence, one can simply study the history of the civil rights movement in North Carolina or Milwaukee and discover that cross-racial concern was absolutely occurring during the civil rights movement. Now how we define "love" and "concern" may be up for debate, but to categorically frame the civil rights movement--and all conscious sympathizers--as lacking in concern and love just doesn't hold water. It would have been much more productive for Alexander to take the civil rights movement as well as racial justice champions to task with convincing evidence. She does this to some degree in her later chapters, but her "no concern" claim unfairly lays mass incarceration at the feet of civil rights thinkers. If Alexander's purpose is to "stimulate a conversation" and get people thinking and talking about mass incarceration, she has accomplished her goal (15). Over the past two years, in fact, Alexander has appeared on National Public Radio, Democracy Now, and C-SPAN, as well as been invited to give talks in churches, universities, bookstores, and other spaces around the country. In light of her critical embrace of the Civil Rights Movement and the apparent rise of her The New Jim Crow as perhaps a galvanizing force for justice, the popularity of her book begs a few questions: Is The New Jim Crow and similar works that centralize injustice the new frontier for a contemporary Civil Rights Movement? And is The New Jim Crow evidence enough that the Civil Rights Movement has never ended, but only recast in the realm of ideas? Alexander, of course, would argue that a movement must be more than ideas; it must also be built on love, human and racial recognition, and the full embrace of difference. For Alexander, nothing less will do. However, as she argues in her "Introduction," racialized systems of control are "inevitable"--almost as if mass incarceration is destined to be reborn (15). Though Alexander gives ways to prevent this rebirth, such teleology, though present throughout her book, is never reconciled. In the end, we are left with a conflicted, uneasy sense of hope as the racial control telos haunts readers even after the book has been shelved.

Slavery supposedly ended in 1865, at the end of The Civil War. So, we are told. Then, here comes Professor Michelle Alexander to tell us that simply is not true. Slavery's child was something called Jim Crow, a whole system of laws designed to thwart the lives of African-American people on so many different levels. In order to fight Jim Crow, The Civil Rights Movement waged war on many fronts, many of them legal. The thinking went that if the legal barriers were dropped, the lives of African-Americans would be so much better. Or, so it was thought. Then came Ronald Reagan into the office of the Presidency. A War was waged, the so-called, "War On Drugs." This has led to the fact that all over America, people of color, but particularly Black Men and the poor, are herded into prisons, with all kinds of drug charges and laws. These charges result in a whole system that selectively targets where it will be "enforcing" the drug laws. If a certain community has a predominance of drug activity, but yet law enforcement never bothers to scrutinize that community, then drug dealers from that community will never be charged. Studies have shown that there is no more drug activity in Black Communities than in others, but the Prison/Industrial Complex is set up in such a way that only certain communities are scrutinized, or disproportionally, scrutinized for them. Of course if the police never look for drugs in a certain place, they will never find them. When those who have been caught up in the system become released from prison, now it becomes "legal" to discriminate against them. Their "records" can be used to discriminate against them in employment, housing, education, in a word--everything. Welcome to "The New Jim Crow." Right here in America. Home of the free. A Democracy. Who wants to laugh? (to keep from crying?). In thumbnail sketch, this is what Michelle Alexander lays out in her book, the unfairness of it all, how it makes a mockery of the concept of justice and Democracy. It is Professor Alexander's opinion that the phenomenon that she spells out, The Prison/Industrial Complex, should become the basis for the next Civil Rights Movement. In this respect, I think that she is right. Although Professor Alexander is an attorney, what is most fascinating about her book is how she tells her personal story as basically being an oblivious, average citizen, who thought that when people said the war on drugs was a war on Black people, they were exaggerating. But, as she began to look into things, she saw the truth of this thesis and ultimately felt she had to do something about it. This, in part, led to her book. This book is written in a very readable style so that it is available to the average reader. I think Professor Alexander's book is excellent in educating and bringing to the spotlight what needs to be our next Civil Rights Movement. Words cannot really express my gratefulness to her for doing this. In talking about the Prison/Industrial Complex, there is another book that can be found right here on Amazon that complements Alexander's. It's called "The Anatomy Of Prison Life" by Charles L. Hinsley. It is the most honest and real account that one will ever find on what it means to be in prison, written from the eyes of a Black Man first/Former Warden perspective. It is well worth your time. One should mull over in one's mind, as one reads, the connection between the Alexander and Hinsley books. For those interested in the more general subject of Black Studies, there's a book called, "Reality's Pen: Reflections On Family, History & Culture," by Thomas D. Rush that gives some good background to the 2 books mentioned above. Rush's book can also be found right here on Amazon. In Rush's work, we get to see the "average Joe's" fascinating 1989 account of two very long conversations with what will eventually become the first African-American President in American History. It's good to get this account because it occurs long before President Obama is famous, between two people just going about the daily business of their lives. What makes the interaction even more compelling is the fact that Obama innocently lays out an image of what he hopes to see occur within his romantic life, a romantic life prior to the time of his introduction to Michelle. It is oh so fascinating, and can be found in the piece on page 95 of Rush's work called, "You Never Know Who God Wants You To Meet." Rush's book also contains additional Black Cultural anecdotes of richness, making it an overall, well-rounded book and worthy of your purchase.

Book Review: The New Jim Crow Associate professor of law at Ohio State University, a civil rights advocate and writer, Michelle Alexander and her book, The New Jim Crow is about how even in today’s society, racism is still very prominent. She writes about how instead of having direct laws prohibiting African-Americans from voting, the government is using the excuse that convicted criminals are not able to vote, to deny the African-American population from voting. What seems like a book that is about how racism is still highly active in America turns into a book about how our judicial system here is biassed and unjust. My English teacher suggested this book to me, so I thought I’d read it. Another reason I was motivated to read it was because there has been so much public attention on what currently is happening with police violence involving the growing rate racial profiling on the part of law officers. In Alexander’s book, the core message throughout heavily highlights the racial dimensions of the War on Drugs. The book argues that federal drug policy unfairly targets communities of colour. This keeps millions of young, black men in a cycle of poverty and behind bars. It is clear that Alexander is able to create such a scholarly piece of literature based on her legal background. The book is supported by relevant data and case law. While I believe that there is a large truth factor to her opinion, I do not think that the government is purposefully planning to be racist toward individuals. I think that after so many years of living under Jim Crow laws that it is more of a subconscious series of actions being taken. Saying so, it does not make it okay, and I strongly agree with her book in that we have to first realise what is happening to be able to make changes so that racial biassing will come to a complete end. At the very beginning of the book, Alexander tells us who the book is written for. It’s written for the people who are victims of the war on drugs and. It’s also for all the people who cannot speak out because they are being oppressed. Alexander’s background in law helps her arguments by using clear and undebatable evidence. The way it is written makes your stomach ache and all of a sudden all your white guilt creeps up. For me it’s crazy that it took a book for me to realize the mass injustice of our nation. Alexander repeatedly points out that the main issue is that we just let this happen. The prisons in America are being overfilled everyday and the amount of people who are there for no other reason than they’re getting arrested because they’re black. Now no one would ever say this directly to anyone’s face but Alexander had the courage to write an entire book about the injustice. This book has sparked so many people’s attention that the book’s goal is starting to be achieved. Alexander’s main purpose of this book was to make it so people are aware of what is taking in this country. While the book was amazing, I do not think there were many counter arguments in her book. Her evidence was strong enough where she may have felt like she didn’t need it. Overall, I truly enjoyed reading the book. While at times the book made me feel awful, it also opened my eyes to an entirely new perspective. I know want to learn more in how I can make a difference from the racial injustice in this country.

Having grown up as a white woman in the South and living in Southern states about 1/3 of my long lifetime, I saw and heard suspicious evidence and years ago, as early as the Reagan hegemony, drew similar conclusions. This necessary book, The New Jim Crow, reinforces my conclusions and provides the details--some of which shocked even someone who had long been following the travesty of the incarceration of young African Americans. Some Americans of all races are still so ignorant of reality they believe that most of the people in prison are actual felons, real criminals like murderers or burglars. They have been propagandized by a conspiracy that dates back to Reagan, and need to read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, where they will learn that Reagan and his Karl Rove crew instituted alarmist fear as a political ploy. Since crime and drug use had been declining in the 1970s, the Republican Party (instead of rejoicing) grew alarmed. A contented and prosperous nation isn’t easy to manipulate. So out of nothing they created a nightmare propaganda tool to give their old whine of Lawnorder a huge p-r opportunity. Perhaps it got away from them, since it is now mowing our nation down to the dirt. The mass media, of course, went along with Reagan's fantasies and the Big Lie of the War on Drugs worked. Scared voters ate it up, voted out sensible members of Congress, replaced by fanatic right-wingers paid off by the rising Oligarchs, who approved their own kind as regulators, judges and Supreme Court justices, and refused to even consider anyone who could not be manipulated. With our last two Supreme Courts, our Constitutional rights have been twisted and undermined to the point where an innocent person wrongly imprisoned no longer has even a thread of legal recourse. The awful results are now bloated beyond even Rush Limbaugh's drug-fantasies and waistline. Private prison building, along with lethal gas fracking and foreign pipelines leaking into our soil to export tar sands oil to foreign countries, are the fastest growing U.S. industries, on behalf of something erroneously called “capitalism”—although Adam Smith, an honorable man, would consider our economic system to be his loathed Mercantile Oligarchy reborn, and definitely not what he envisioned as “capitalism”. Under our current system, private prisons are subsidized by state politicians and to keep raking in money, both need new bodies for the cells. Paid informers make false accusations, police forces are now armed and trained for free by the military, get paid overtime for extra arrests, and manage to terrify and kill numerous innocent bystanders as victims of police shootouts during daily stop-and-frisks and break-ins of their homes. Any gun-toting white man in Florida (where I grew up as a white Middle Class teenager) can kill at will—and they do. The ones who suffer most are people of color and the rest of the poor. You don't need to do anything to get arrested, indicted and convicted on a plea-bargain but have the wrong color of skin or accent, lack money, live in a run-down city or neighborhood, have a mental problem or addiction, and/or be homeless and wandering. Any one of those will enable you to fall helplessly into our penal Slough of Despond and there’s a good chance you’ll die there. Studying the issues is a necessary educational step. Mass action is more important, but hard to engender. Truly ignorant people still think that the people rotting in our prisons actually perpetrated some violence to a victim. Not true. Our mean, punitive prisons incarcerate an enormous percentage of innocent poor people, or persons who never would have arrested in earlier times, who accept 4 year sentences under the plea bargaining, "Three Strikes and You're Jailed for Life" and "No Parole" laws set up by America's controlling rulers. What the vast majority of prisoners really need are treatment centers, a place to live, better education—and jobs. And that is exactly what the pseudo-capitalists refuse to do. Our prisons and the ridiculous punitive laws, throwing innocent kids in with hardened murderers, rapists and muggers, then penalizing those who have been released with loss of public privileges and the vote, are the primary creators of violence, embitterment, and actual crime. Our arrest and prison system teaches our kids how to be criminals and makes them recidivists—but as Michelle Alexander’s neutral legal prose corroborates, to some of its sneakiest designers that was its purpose all along.

Alexander’s central claim is that all of the problems for current minorities stem from racism. Racism has existed from slavery, then Jim Crow, and now the stigma of being a criminal. She provides the modern criminal justice system as evidence that the US continues to be a systemically racist nation. She then uses the criminal justice system to support claims of racism in every other sector related to minority impoverishment (education, housing, public assistance, employment). She does a great job giving strong evidence in the first two chapters. Essentially, the end of Jim Crow left a power absence for elite whites. The elite whites decided to create a War on Drugs even though crime, especially drug crime, was not seen by the US public to be a significant issue. Alexander provides significant evidence to support why this effort by elite white conservatives was made. She also does a decent job at showing implicit bias within the criminal justice system. There is no smoking gun. However, the conscious decisions and discretion of police officers and prosecutors , backed by hard statistics on criminal enforcement, is very convincing to show at the very least implicit racism. And this is where she stops being convincing. She then argues that criminal justice is at the root cause of all other failures in the black community. Chapter by chapter she eschews statistics or evidence (except going back to criminal justice statistics) and rather sticks to rhetorical arguments. Whenever she’s in doubt she just says that implicit racism cannot always be backed up by statistics. It just exists. Economic arguments for why blacks are unemployed are ignored. Instead, she focuses on the stigma of being a criminal. Economics are a secondary and rather minute cause that is overshadowed by this modern form of racism. A core concept of her argument is that racism is cyclical in nature. It was bad in slavery, not so bad in reconstruction, it was bad in Jim Crow, not so bad in the Civil Rights era, and now it is back to being bad. Criminals are the new slaves. However, if this is true, then minorities should have been much better off economically during the Civil Rights era then they were during the Reagan or Clinton administration. She provides no evidence of this. It’s all empty rhetoric. What’s just as troubling is that the economic condition of the middle class in America has been stagnant since 1970. All economic growth has gone to the top 10%. She completely ignores this and presents poverty among blacks as a simple result of racism that is distributed via the criminal justice system. Her arguments beyond chapter 2 seem specious. It seems like an excellent example of the old college cliché, "correlation does not equal causation". I have various issues with her work that can be considered nitpicking. I have extensive experience with public defender offices and legal aid offices. Both of which are common in her book. She constantly says public defenders do a terrible job representing minority clients. She also makes rather outrageous claims about welfare and housing benefits. First, public defenders do a damn fine job. It’s a myth that they cannot adequately represent their clients due to lack of resources. Don’t get me wrong, they have a tough job. However, I personally know dozens of public defenders, throughout the country, and I’d say they provide excellent representation. The major problem for public defense is in the Deep South. It is in the South that public defenders are drastically underfunded and, often, their work is outsourced to shady private firms. Alexander cherry picks her data about public defenders from these Southern states and then tries to say that example fits everywhere. She’s absolutely wrong about this and she does a great disservice to thousands of hardworking public defender’s because of her baseless claims. Second, her claims about public assistance are just as outlandish. Yes, it is true that drug criminals (specifically drug criminals – not all criminals) can be evicted for having drug activity. This is not nearly the death knell she writes about. There are a number of statutory protections for families in public housing. As long as they kick out the person dealing drugs then they can’t be evicted. Even if the person dealing drugs is the only person on the lease the other family members can still live in the house if the drug dealer gets evicted. The same situation can be said of all other public benefits. This is hardly a situation, painted in the book, where a person caught with a joint will have their entire family evicted and there is no legal recourse! On a related issue: Alexander’s focus on public housing shows how out of touch she is on public assistance. Public housing practically doesn’t exist outside of large, liberal metropolitan cities. In rural areas public housing is hardly a blip on the radar (Due to scarcity, it takes 5 years of being on a waiting list to even be considered for public housing in my county). In conservative states they don’t invest in public housing. Meanwhile, public housing is much more available in places where Alexander has lived and worked in the past (ex: San Francisco). Third, she often paints Supreme Court cases as being against blacks when they have nothing to do with race. The best example of this is standing. Standing is a fancy word for being able to bring a case to court. All of the landmark decisions on standing have been about environmental policy. A side effect of these landmark cases has been to shut out civil rights litigation (it’s literally a footnote in my Constitutional Law casebook). She completely ignores the environmental cases (or even that they exist) and makes it seem like the Supreme Court is intentionally being racist in their constricted view of standing. This is something that laymen might forgive her but I don’t think any attorney should be so kind. Another major complaint I have about the book is that it treats latinos as token minorities. Alexander uses Latinos to express troubling statistics. However, they are completely omitted from the narrative of the book. Blacks are given every narrative, of which there are many, to express how the criminal justice system affects communities. Latinos are completely forgotten. It’s strange that a movement looking to empower all races focuses specifically on one. Even though Latinos are almost as bad off as blacks. Even poor whites are given more pages in this book than Latinos. If I were Latino I would be curious why I was completely marginalized, except when needed to back up a black narrative, in a book that’s supposed to be about uniting all minorities. I think this is a very good book. Like Alexander, I think this is a great conversation starter. However, unlike Alexander, I don’t think we should reach all of the same conclusions as her when looking at this book in the big picture. She presents a good case the criminal justice system is systemically racist. She presents a very poor argument that the criminal justice system is the cause of all the ills within black communities. I’ve complained a lot above about this book but don’t misunderstanding me. Michelle Alexander has done a good job. I just think she took her good ideas and then went into a Twilight Zone of racial conspiracies.

A second reading of the New Jim Crow only strengthens Michelle Alexander's compelling argument that systemic bias is built into our public policy process to incarcerate and disenfranchise the poor, but obviously focused on the young black male. It's a hard argument to accept, but Alexander's precise, well documented and reasoned treatise makes it impossible to refute. The tragic cost in the potential for our society makes one wonder why policy makers and the media have been so silent. Could it be that they are complicit in this charade? I came to this book after seeing Alexander on Bill Moyers and, to be honest, found many of her arguments and conclusions to be weird to looney. But I decided to give her book a try and it has stayed with me ever since. I must explain, as a 50 year old middle class male with a nebulous ethic categorization, one who has never even known anyone who has served time, I have never had an interest nor even awareness of this issue. It should seemingly be unimportant to me. But as Alexander makes clear, this is my fight too. Alexander does a masterful job, among many, of tying the incentive to local law eforcement federal funding to the war on drugs and how it both skews priorities and public perception to believe there is far more crime than really exists. And of course, there has to be a culprit--usually, but not always, a young black male--and there has to be a system in place to deal with this "danger to society." (sarcasm intended The policies are built on the acceptance of misinformation, the failure of law enforcement, a judiciary that feeds the prison system, and a public/private partnership that thrives on a steady supply of inmates. It is an argument that at first seems too simplistic until you give this book the time and attention it deserves. By the time I had finished my second reading, I fail to understand why we, as a nation, ignore this. Race obviously is the underlying reason. That, combined with intellectual laziness probably accounts for most of the situation. When taken together with David Cay Johnston's argument in Free Lunch that the home security industry, which provides little that citizens and communities don't already do themselves, has in interest in making people feel insecure, it is easy to mesh Alexander's case together to produce a plausible outcome. We have mostly groundless fears, an industry that benefits from state and local public resources maintains a climate of fear to continue to make profits, public policy largely uses the war on drugs as a pretext for making that unfounded fear worse, and poor, young, black males make a perfect scapegoat. Those of us who have given up on Obama can look back on this issue as another reason we are disgusted with this administration. Rather than use the bully pulpit to take Alexander's argument and educate the American people, it is ignored. Instead deportations have become vogue and quietly the political and commericial interests in maintaining the war on drugs are becoming the dominant voices at the Department of Justice and other federal agencies. Instead we are losing generations of citizens needlessly, diverting massive public resources and talents, and repeating the mistakes of the past again. Truly heartbreaking. And the lagniappe (that little something extra) for the Republican Party? Disenfranchising, in some cases permanently, voters who are largely inclined to vote for Republican opponents. This may be the most haunting of all public policy books you will ever read.

Jim Crow is an ugly blemish on the American nation and while much of the repressive practices of Jim Crow have been eliminated or at least sharply curtailed, there are still active, often covert and/or conniving ways to keep minority races in their place. These underhanded means of social control and oppression are the subject of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. So, what exactly is the new Jim Crow? It is a means to control, dehumanize, repress, and ultimately destroy the lives of minorities by finding ways to target them for breaking crimes and send them off to prison. The main weapon of control is the disastrous and immoral war on drugs and this book devotes most of its pages to examining this so- called war, showing how it was devised and implemented as a way to unfairly target blacks and other minorities. This book is well- articulated and researched and some of its statistics are shocking. As I read, I often thought that the some of the stats had to be typos- they were too extreme to be true. But a quick check of sources proves them accurate. The chances of getting arrested, going to prison, and spending the rest of your life labeled as a felon are multiple times higher if your skin happens to be dark. Even if exactly the same crime is committed, a white person has exponentially greater odds of getting off easy, sometimes even having all charges dropped or the crime reduced. The disparities among different groups of people prove that the war on drugs has nothing to do with gaining control of a substance and everything to do with targeting specific groups of people. I can remember back in the 1980’s when the war on drugs was picking up steam. I was a university student at the time and we used to debate the drug war and its true motives. We all agreed that the war had nothing to do with the actual drugs- no one, not even a politician, could be so stupid to think that a war could be won against a substance. We knew there was something else going on and now that decades of data are available, the true motives have been exposed. This book does an excellent job explaining how/why the war on drugs was invented and how its proponents have been generally successful at pulling it off and making it seem like a fair, ‘colorblind’ way to deal with criminal activity. America’s racist past isn’t really in the past, as much as we want to believe. We like to think that progress has been made and, in many ways, it has, but we are far away from a truly equal and fair society. The New Jim Crow is an excellent way to learn about the new tactics embraced by the racist crowd and a call to action for everyone who wants to work toward a fair and just society.

In her book, “The New Jim Crow”, civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar Michelle Alexander makes the case that the “war on drugs” since its launch in the early eighties has resulted in a new system of racial control in the US. In this system, young black men are disproportionately incarcerated for drug offences, which marks them as felons and subjects them to many life-long forms of legal discrimination. The war on drugs effectively relegates many black and brown men to a lower racial caste in society, similar to slavery and the Jim Crow era in the past. As such, mass incarceration has given rise to a New Jim Crow era. Based on numerous facts and studies quoted in the book, mass incarceration as a result of the war on drugs has taken on enormous proportions. “In less than thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase.” “The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature. No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities.” “Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.” However, “in some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men. And in major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.” With great clarity and detail, the author outlines the various elements that turned the war on drugs into an effective system of racial control, from the motivations and tactics used by police forces in drug arrests, and the way the U.S. criminal justice system is structured to lead to discrimination against people of color, to the legal discrimination of people labeled as felons after their time in prison. The book also analyzes the similarities and differences between mass incarceration, the Jim Crow era, and slavery, each in their own historical context. Based on this analysis, Michelle Alexander argues that the current trend towards colorblindness in society is one of the root causes for the racial caste system resulting from the war on drugs. From this point of view, the author takes a critical look at the current legislative focus of many civil rights efforts and issues a call to action to better address the underlying causes of racial control systems. The book is well written and organized, with a target audience of “people who care deeply about racial justice but who, for any number of reasons, do not yet appreciate the magnitude of the crisis faced by communities of color as a result of mass incarceration.” Considering myself part of this target audience, I can say that the book indeed opened my eyes to the system of mass incarceration with its many implications for people of color, and gave me many new points of view from which to approach this phenomenon.

Alexander argues in 'The New Jim Crow' that the US War on Drugs (launched by Reagan and escalated under Clinton - years in which drug use was actually in decline) has led directly to the mass incarceration of the young adult male African American population in the US. She uses an impressive array of statistical data to support her claim that the rhetoric of the drugs war, though 'racially sanitized', has produced a "new system of racialized social control" and that this development has been facilitated by the courts (including the US Supreme Court) which have turned a blind eye to racial bias in law enforcement by police, prosecutors and judges. Some of the statistical materials that Alexander provides to support her arguments are scarcely believable. Take, for example, the fact that in major US cities up to 80% of all young African American males now have a criminal record; that in at least 15 US states the rate of imprisonment of blacks on drugs charges is 20 to 50 times higher than that of whites (even though the evidence shows that white youths are more likely to be involved in drug usage), and that over 31 million people have been arrested for drugs offences since the War on Drugs began. The savage sentencing powers of judges are also difficult to comprehend. For instance, a 10-year prison sentence can be imposed for possession of a small quantity of marijuana; a 5-year minimum sentence is mandatory for simple possession of cocaine, and life sentences are regarded as "perfectly appropriate" for first-time drug offenders. Even the death penalty is allowed for certain drugs-related crimes. Alexander also notes that the US now has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, imprisoning a much higher proportion of its population than, say, Russia, China, Iran or even apartheid South Africa. The devastating consequences of imprisonment are compounded by what Alexander calls 'legalized discrimination' experienced by those who have been imprisoned, including lifetime bans on voting and jury service as well as restrictions on access to public housing, employment, education and welfare benefits. "For a minor offense", Alexander writes, "you can be subjected to discrimination, scorn, and exclusion for the rest of your life." Mass incarceration, she argues, has created a caste system whose members are "permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society" on a scale "unparalleled in world history". In short, "mass incarceration, like its predecessor Jim Crow, creates and maintains racial segregation." This is a truly astonishing book and the writing is powerful and passionate. But this is not exaggerated polemic. There are over 30 pages of notes and references at the end of the book and Alexander is meticulous in providing chapter and verse to support her arguments. The New Jim Crow is shocking and makes very disturbing reading.

Great book.

Importante leitura para se entender um pouco mais de cono tudo era ainda pior há alguns anos.

Bien

En plus cité dans le dernier numéro de Chéribibi mag!!! Pose de bonnes questions et essaie d'y répondre intelligemment, donc lecture recommandée!