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

by Michelle Alexander

Few people wanted to hear that, despite appearances, since the end of slavery our nation has remained trapped in a cycle of reform, backlash, and reformation of systems of racialized social control.

Every system of injustice depends on the silence, paralysis, confusion, and cooperation of those it seeks to eliminate or control.

Once released, former prisoners enter a hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent social exclusion.

as “criminals” and then ushers them into a parallel social universe in which they may be denied the right to vote and be subject to legal discrimination in employment, housing, and basic public benefits for the rest of their lives.

a slew of legislation authorizing legal discrimination against millions of people accused of drug offenses, denying them access to housing, food stamps, credit, basic public benefits, and financial aid for schooling.

the distinction between survivors and perpetrators of violence is largely illusory, as virtually no one commits violence without first surviving it.

If we want to reduce violence in our communities, we need to hold people accountable in ways that aim to repair and prevent harm rather than simply inflicting more harm and trauma and calling it justice.

The drug war may have received some black support, but the politics of white supremacy—including fear mongering, scapegoating, and a willingness to invest heavily in racial separation, exclusion, and control (while slashing funds for welfare, education, housing, drug treatment, and more)—is what ultimately gave birth to the new Jim Crow.

we must come to see the system of mass incarceration as a form of organized violence against our communities, rather than a meaningful response to violence committed by individuals within our communities.

The safest communities are not the ones with the most police, prisons, or electronic monitors, but the ones with quality schools, health care, housing, plentiful jobs, and strong social networks that allow families not merely to survive but to thrive.

we must do what is required of all liberation struggles: educate ourselves and others, speak unpopular truths, provide support for those who have been harmed, and organize against the systems that seek to oppress, control, and divide us.

The system of mass incarceration created a legal framework by which the rights and benefits of citizenship are routinely stripped away from millions of U.S. citizens labeled “criminals” and “felons” until they mirror (and,

at times, dip below) those of non-citizen immigrants within the United States.

Immigration violations that were once treated as minor civil infractions are now crimes. And everyday legal infractions, ranging from shoplifting to marijuana possession to traffic violations, now routinely trigger one of the state’s most devastating sanctions—deportation.

White people are generally allowed to have problems, and they’ve historically been granted the power to define and respond to them. But people of color—in this “land of the free” forged through slavery and genocide—are regularly viewed and treated as the problem.

Once human beings are defined as the problem in the public consciousness, their elimination through deportation, incarceration, or even genocide becomes nearly inevitable.

White nationalism, at its core, reflects a belief that our nation’s problems would be solved if only people of color could somehow be gotten rid of, or at least better controlled.

As Khalil Gibran Muhammad points out in The Condemnation of Blackness, throughout our nation’s history, when crime and immigration have been perceived as white, our nation’s response has been radically different from when those phenomena have been defined as black or brown.

Electronic monitoring is now being used widely to track, monitor, and surveil U.S. citizens released on probation or parole—often with those being monitored footing the bill—as well as immigrants released from custody at the border.

in many jurisdictions today, judges make decisions about who should be held in jail and who should be set “free” based on a computer algorithm.

Even though algorithms are often discriminatory—since they reflect in their programming biases already baked into our criminal justice system—and even though being constantly surveilled by an electronic monitor isn’t actually freedom, many reformers believe these kinds of technological advances can point us in the direction of justice.

we must not be seduced into believing that improving the system is the same as dismantling or transforming it.

We must strive to create a nation in which caging people en masse—digitally or literally—and stripping them of basic civil and human rights for the rest of their lives is not only unnecessary but unthinkable.

large numbers of Latinos are being misclassified as white, distorting the data.

Human rights champion Bryan Stevenson has observed that “slavery didn’t end; it evolved.”

The notion that if you’ve ever committed a crime you’re permanently disposable is the very idea that has rationalized mass incarceration in the United States.

Anyone with an “aggravated felony” was deemed a number-one priority, but the extremely broad definition of “aggravated felony” under immigration law includes people whose crimes are neither aggravated nor a felony. The term can apply to convictions such as shoplifting, drug possession, and low-level crimes that carry little or no jail time.

Roughly 60 percent of deportations involved people with no criminal record at all or whose only crime was immigration-related, such as illegal entry.