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

by Michelle Alexander

many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.

An extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history. They are also subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service,

In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt.

Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.

Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you are afforded scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.

Once they are released, they are often denied the right to vote, excluded from juries, and relegated to a racially segregated and subordinated existence.

confined to the margins of mainstream society and denied access to the mainstream economy.

legally denied the ability to obtain employment, housing, and public benefits—

War on Drugs was launched in response to the crisis caused by crack cocaine in inner-city neighborhoods.

efforts to address rampant drug crime in poor, minority neighborhoods.

President Ronald Reagan officially announced the current drug war in 1982, before crack became an issue in the media or a crisis in poor black neighborhoods.

build public and legislative support for the

war.

In fact, the War on Drugs began at a time when illegal drug use was on the decline.6 During this same time period, however, a war was declared, causing arrests and convictions for drug offenses to skyrocket, especially among people of color.

thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase.

United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world,

750 per 100,000.8

These stark racial disparities cannot be explained by rates of drug crime. Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar

rates.

white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color.

despite the unprecedented levels of incarceration in the African American community, the civil rights community is oddly quiet. One in three young African American men will serve time in prison if current trends continue,

Yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis).

The attention of civil rights advocates has been largely devoted to other issues, such as affirmative action.

consumed much of the attention and resources of the civil rights community and dominated racial justice discourse in the mainstream media,

Still, despite these significant developments, there seems to be a lack of appreciation for the enormity of the crisis at hand.

There also remains a persistent tendency in the civil rights community to treat the criminal justice system as just another institution infected with lingering racial bias.

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—

is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement.

What is key to America’s understanding of class is the persistent belief—despite all evidence to the contrary—that anyone, with the proper discipline and drive, can move from a lower class to a higher class. We recognize that mobility may be difficult, but the key to our collective self-image is the assumption that mobility is always possible, so failure to move up reflects on one’s character. By extension, the failure of a race or ethnic group to move up reflects very poorly on the group as a whole.

What is completely missed in the rare public debates today about the plight of African Americans is that a huge percentage of them are not free to move up at all. It is not just that they lack opportunity, attend poor schools, or are plagued by poverty. They are barred by law from doing so. And the major institutions with which they come into contact are designed to prevent their mobility.

The current system of control depends on black exceptionalism; it is not disproved or undermined by it. Others may wonder how a racial caste system could exist when most Americans—of all colors—oppose race discrimination and endorse colorblindness. Yet as we shall see in the pages that follow, racial caste systems do not require racial hostility or overt bigotry to thrive. They need only racial indifference,

mass incarceration, Jim Crow, and slavery—the three major racialized systems of control adopted in the United States to date.

I believe that the similarities between these systems of control overwhelm the differences and that mass incarceration, like its predecessors, has been largely immunized from legal challenge.

No caste system in the United States has ever governed all black people; there have always been “free blacks” and black success stories, even during slavery and Jim Crow.

Following the collapse of each system of control, there has been a period of confusion—transition—in which those who are most committed to racial hierarchy search for new means to achieve their goals within the rules of the game as currently defined.

This feat has been achieved largely by appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower-class whites, a group of people who are understandably eager to ensure that they never find themselves trapped at the bottom of the American hierarchy.

In an effort to protect their superior status and economic position, the planters shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandoned their heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of the importation of more black slaves.

“racial bribe.”

the planter class extended special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves. White settlers were allowed greater access to Native American lands,

servants were allowed to police slaves through slave patrols and militias, and barriers were created so that free labor would not be p...

Poor whites suddenly had a direct, personal stake in the existence of a race-based system of slavery. Their own plight had not improved by much, but at least they were not slaves.

The language of the Constitution itself was deliberately colorblind (the words slave or Negro were never used), but the document was built upon a compromise regarding the prevailing racial caste system. Federalism—the division of power between the states and the federal government—was the device employed to protect the institution of slavery and the political power of slaveholding states.

Under the terms of our country’s founding document, slaves were defined as three-fifths of a person not a real, whole human being.

The Strange Career of Jim Crow,

the end of slavery created an extraordinary dilemma for Southern white society. Without the labor of former slaves,

the region’s economy would surely collapse, and without the institution of slavery, there was no longer a formal mechanism for maintaining racial hierarchy and preventing “amalgamation” with a group of people considered intrinsically inferior and vile.

Following the Civil War, the economic and political infrastructure of the South was in shambles.

the development of a new racial order became the consuming passion for most white Southerners.

In fact, the current stereotypes of black men as aggressive, unruly predators can be traced to this period,