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

by Michelle Alexander

When researchers have controlled for joblessness, differences in violent crime rates between young black and white men disappear.

In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.

The collapse of inner-city economies coincided with the conservative backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, resulting in the perfect storm. Almost overnight, black men found themselves unnecessary to the American economy and demonized by mainstream society. No longer needed to pick cotton in the fields or labor in factories, lower-class black men were hauled off to prison in droves. They were vilified in the media and condemned for their condition as part of a well-orchestrated political campaign to build a new white, Republican majority in the South. Decades later, curious onlookers in the grips of denial would wonder aloud, “Where have all the black men gone?”

As sociologist Bruce Western has shown, the notion that the 1990s—the Clinton years—were good times for African Americans, and that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” is pure fiction. As unemployment rates sank to historically low levels in the late 1990s for the general population, jobless rates among noncollege black men in their twenties rose to their highest levels ever, propelled by skyrocketing incarceration rates.

Across the South as a whole, a mere 1 percent of black school children were attending school with whites in 1964—a full decade after Brown was decided.24 Brown did not end Jim Crow; a mass movement had to emerge first—one that aimed to create a new public consensus opposed to the evils of Jim Crow.

Imprisonment, they say, now creates far more crime than it prevents, by ripping apart fragile social networks, destroying families, and creating a permanent class of unemployables.

Operation Ceasefire and Oakland’s Lifeline program—which reach out to gang members and offer them jobs and opportunities rather than prison time if they cease their criminal activities—in dramatically reducing violent crime

A promising indicator of the public’s receptivity to a change in course is California’s Proposition 36, which mandated drug treatment rather than jail for first-time offenders, and was approved by more than 60 percent of the electorate in 2000.

More than forty-five years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. warned of this danger. He insisted that blindness and indifference to racial groups is actually more important than racial hostility to the creation and maintenance of racialized systems of control.

The empirical evidence strongly supports the conclusion that declining wages, downsizing, deindustrialization, globalization, and cutbacks in government services represent much greater threats to the position of white men than so-called reverse discrimination.40

In the current era, white Americans are often eager to embrace token or exceptional African Americans, particularly when they go out of their way not to talk about race or racial inequality.

Obama chose Joe Biden, one of the Senate’s most strident drug warriors, as his vice president.

Obama has revived President Clinton’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program and increased funding for the Byrne grant program—two of the worst federal drug programs of the Clinton era.

Obama’s budget for law enforcement is actually worse than the Bush administration’s in terms of the ratio of dollars devoted to prevention and drug treatment as opposed to law enforcement.56