Public Employee Press

Book Review

Mass imprisonment is the new Jim Crow system

In her incisive new book, "The New Jim Crow," legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that instead of ending the racial caste system in America we have again redesigned it. By targeting Black men and decimating communities of color, she says, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as today's system of racial control, even as it officially practices color blindness.

After slavery was abolished and Black rights grew in the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, white supremacists reestablished control through a combination of Klan terror, Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement laws that lasted from 1876 until the victories of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

Alexander forcefully argues that white backlash led to a new system of repression in the form of mass incarceration of Black men.

This "new Jim Crow," which started with Nixon's War on Crime as an electoral strategy to win southern states, gained strength with Reagan's War on Drugs as a racially coded Republican appeal for white working-class votes, and reached its height under Clinton, whose policies increased prison populations more than any other president.

While race-neutral on the surface, the drug crime laws selectively imprison African Americans, who many studies say are no more likely to possess or sell drugs than their white counterparts.

Crime rates have fluctuated in recent years and are now relatively low, while imprisonment has soared. Crime rates cannot account for the sudden mass incarceration of African Americans over the last 30 years.

According to Alexander, more Black men are in prison or on probation or parole than were enslaved before the Civil War. Millions of African American men serve long prison sentences for low-level drug crimes. Upon release as felons, they often lose their right to vote and can legally be discriminated against in housing, education and employment.

This new Jim Crow system helps explain why Black male unemployment is double the U.S. average and four in 10 Black children are born into poverty.

Michelle Alexander sees today's mass incarceration as a civil rights issue that we should answer with a new mass movement. NAACP Pres. Benjamin Jealous says her book is "a call to action."

"The New Jim Crow" is available for members to borrow in the Ed Fund Library, Room 211 at DC 37.

— Ken Nash
DC 37 Education Fund Library