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Started reading
January 15, 2018
“A call to action for everyone concerned with racial justice and an important tool for anyone concerned with understanding and dismantling this oppressive system.”
the War on Drugs.
audience in mind—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.
Open Society Institute of the Soros Foundation,
Egalitarian
It may be surprising to some that drug crime was declining, not rising, when a drug war was declared. From a historical perspective, however, the lack of correlation between crime and punishment is nothing new.
Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns.
the American penal system has emerged as a system of social control unparalleled in world history.
primary targets of its control can be defined largely by race.
“no new institutions for adults should be built and existing institutions for juveniles should be closed.”
There is overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it.”
the civil rights community is oddly quiet.
in some cities more than half of all young adult black men are currently under correctional control—in prison or jail, on probation or parole.
Why We Can’t Wait: Reversing the Retreat on Civil Rights, which included panels discussing school integration, employment discrimination, housing and lending discrimination, economic justice, environmental justice, disability rights, age discrimination, and immigrants’ rights. Not a single panel was devoted to criminal justice reform.
“zero tolerance” policies that effectively funnel youth of color from schools to jails.
This book argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system. Mass incarceration—not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement—is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement.
I use the term racial caste in this book the way it is used in common parlance to denote a stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom. Jim Crow and slavery were caste systems. So is our current system of mass incarceration.
This larger system, referred to here as mass incarceration, is a system that locks people not only behind actual bars in actual prisons, but also behind virtual bars and virtual walls—walls that are invisible to the naked eye but function nearly as effectively as Jim Crow laws once did at locking people of color into a permanent second-class citizenship. The term mass incarceration refers not only to the criminal justice system but also to the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison. Once released, former prisoners enter a
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The current system of control permanently locks a huge percentage of the African American community out of the mainstream society and economy. The system operates through our criminal justice institutions, but it functions more like a caste system than a system of crime control.
racial caste systems do not require racial hostility or overt bigotry to thrive.
The system of mass incarceration is based on the prison label, not prison time.
among mass incarceration, Jim Crow, and slavery—the three major racialized systems of control adopted in the United States to date.
Concomitant
This book focuses on the experience of African American men in the new caste system.
stimulate a much-needed conversation about the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetuating racial hierarchy in the United States.
enormous financial incentives have been granted to law enforcement to engage in mass drug arrests through military-style tactics.
In many respects, release from prison does not represent the beginning of freedom but instead a cruel new phase of stigmatization and control.
the shame and stigma of the “prison label” is, in many respects, more damaging to the African American community than the shame and stigma associated with Jim Crow. The criminalization and demonization of black men has turned the black community against itself, unraveling community and family relationships, decimating networks of mutual support, and intensifying the shame and self-hate experienced by the current pariah caste.
