THE NEW JIM CROW

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

The New Jim Crow

The thesis of Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-blindness is exactly what the title implies: the U.S. criminal justice system has become a formal if unnamed means of anti-Black racial discrimination and social exclusion analogous to though distinct from Jim Crow. In the United States, Alexander argues, all aspects of this system — from policing to prosecutions to sentences to prisons to post-release restrictions — have not only a disparate impact on racial minorities, Blacks in particular, but were actively designed as a racial caste system and means of social control in the wake of Jim Crow's collapse. And yet, because the system is officially race neutral and overt racial hostility by individual actors generally cannot be proven, the bulk of society goes around acting as though this racial caste system does not actually exist.

To make her case, Alexander turns naturally to the War on Drugs that began in the 1980s, at time when drug use was on the decline and considered by virtually no one to be a serious social or criminal issue. Though “mass incarceration” and “the drug war” are not quite synonyms, they are fairly close. As Alexander shows, drug convictions make up a very large proportion of the enormous and unprecedented increase in incarceration rate in the past thirty years, from 300,000 in 1980, shortly before the drug war began, to over 2 million today. Alexander writes:

Drug offenses alone account for two-thirds of the rise in the federal inmate population and more than half of the rise in state prisoners between 1985 and 2000. Approximately a half-million people are in prison or jail for a drug offense today, compared to an estimated 41,100 in 1980—an increase of 1,100 percent. Drug arrests have tripled since 1980. As a result, more than 31 million people have been arrested for drug offenses since the drug war began. Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs (Michelle, 2010).

Alexander critically exposes the little understood origins of the War on Drugs. Generally, the drug war is traced to the explosion of crack cocaine in urban Black communities, when in fact crack did not become an issue until several years after the drug war was launched in 1982. The drug war has its roots in a combination of the deindustrialization and globalization that resulted in mass job loss and a predictable and growing white backlash to the gains of the civil rights movement. The rate of Black unemployment quadrupled as a result of factory closings, while white unemployment increased at a far slower rate. With no new jobs appearing in communities of color, Black men were suddenly no longer needed as workers and therefore disposable.

At the same time, unrest was growing among blue-collar white workers as a result of their own ...