The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness in The Majority Report Podcast Goodreads Group

Feb 19, 2014 Elizabeth rated it it was amazing

This book has convinced me that the "War on Drugs" is even more harmful than it appears. I was open to Alexander's idea that it creates a new system of racial control, and she makes it clear that it does. I did previously think that racial inequalities in the justice system were an outcome based in poverty/class inequalities and the personal bigotries of some people who hold power. But it's a lot bigger and more deeply rooted than that.

I think reading this book and listening to Baratunde Thursto This book has convinced me that the "War on Drugs" is even more harmful than it appears. I was open to Alexander's idea that it creates a new system of racial control, and she makes it clear that it does. I did previously think that racial inequalities in the justice system were an outcome based in poverty/class inequalities and the personal bigotries of some people who hold power. But it's a lot bigger and more deeply rooted than that.

I think reading this book and listening to Baratunde Thurston on Marc Maron's WTF podcast kind of drove the point home. Thurston grew up in a poor black neighborhood in Washington DC and his mother made a Herculean effort to keep him and his sister out of trouble. She was successful in that he wound up going to high school at the Sidwell Friends School and then to Harvard. Yes, Thurston worked hard and had the potential to achieve so much academically, but statistically he probably wasn't the only smart kid in his neighborhood. It took a lot more effort to get him into college and out of prison than it would if he had been white.

The high school I went to was mostly white, I knew several kids who smoked pot and a few who did ecstasy or cocaine. There were few (white) drug dealers among my classmates in college. The ones who got caught had relatively light punishment compared to what I read about in this book. Suspension, drug treatment, community service, none of them went to prison. It could have been a lot worse. What happened to the kids in Thurston's neighborhood was not the same as what happened in mine.

I am now a lot more skeptical of the criminal justice system and more open to arguments about prison reform. Where I went to college there were a lot of people involved in prisoners rights and prison abolition and I just didn't get it. Now I think I do. I'm not sure what the next step is though. My initial instinct is to legalize marijuana and to eliminate mandatory minimum sentencing. But Alexander makes clear that that's just getting rid of the symptoms of the problem. And that another form of racial control will spring up in place of the War on Drugs if we only focus on the superficial aspects.

That idea is staggering, and I don't know what to do with it. How do you begin to attack a problem we have only begin to articulate?
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