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

by Michelle Alexander

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

The politics of white supremacy, which defined our original constitution, have continued unabated—repeatedly and predictably engendering new systems of racial and social control.

the political strategy of divide, demonize, and conquer has worked for centuries in the United States—since the days of slavery—to keep poor and working people angry at (and fearful of) one another rather than uniting to challenge unjust political and economic systems.

The politics of “Trumpism” and “fake news” are not new; they are as old as the nation itself. The very same playbook has been used over and over in this country by those who seek to preserve racial hierarchy, or to exploit racial resentments and anxieties for political gain, each time with similar results.

No issue has proved more vexing to this nation than the issue of race, and yet no question is more pressing than how to overcome the politics of white supremacy—a form of politics that not only led to an actual civil war but that threatens our ability ever to create a truly fair, just, and inclusive democracy. We find ourselves in this dangerous place not because something radically different has occurred in our nation’s politics, but because so much has remained the same.

I do not see why anyone who values the dignity of those who have been caged would complain about the “difficulty” or “inconvenience” of uttering a few extra words to emphasize someone’s humanity during the era of mass incarceration. There are many things that are difficult to manage during this period of our nation’s history; avoiding terms that reduce people to prison labels is not one of them.

The truth is that the overwhelming majority of people sentenced to prisons and jails, as well as those placed on probation or parole, have been convicted of nonviolent crimes, especially drug offenses.

In 2019, data reported by the Vera Institute of Justice revealed that police make more than 10 million arrests each year, but only 5 percent of those arrests are for violent offenses

The lie that most people sent to prison are “violent offenders” is dangerous because it perpetuates the false notion that our system of mass incarceration is primarily concerned with violence and that it is well designed to keep communities safe. In fact, our system is primarily concerned with the perpetual control and marginalization of the dispossessed; it is not designed to respond meaningfully to the harms of violence

The United States has a staggering 2.3 million people in prison—a higher rate of incarceration than any country in the world—but it also has another 4.5 million people under state control outside of prisons, on probation or parole. More than 70 million Americans—over 20 percent of the entire U.S. population, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately people of color—now have criminal records that authorize legal discrimination for life.

As many advocates have pointed out, the distinction between survivors and perpetrators of violence is largely illusory, as virtually no one commits violence without first surviving it. Reflexively locking people in cages and subjecting them to degradation and humiliation—inflicting violence and suffering upon people in order to teach them that violence is wrong—is a doomed strategy, especially considering that most people who commit violent crime are victims as well.

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.

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.

if we accept uncritically the notion that prisons offer an answer, and that all we must do is improve our so-called justice systems, we evade the “responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”

Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.10 If there are significant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color.

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.

racial caste systems do not require racial hostility or overt bigotry to thrive. They need only racial indifference, as Martin Luther King Jr. warned more than forty-five years ago.

Convicts had no meaningful legal rights at this time and no effective redress. They were understood, quite literally, to be slaves of the state. The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had abolished slavery but allowed one major exception: slavery remained appropriate as punishment for a crime.

the harsher reality of the South was that the new post–Civil War neoslavery was evolving—not disappearing.”

For many African American voters, the Populist approach was preferable to the paternalism of liberals. Populists preached an “equalitarianism of want and poverty, the kinship of a common grievance, and a common oppressor.”23 As described by Tom Watson, a prominent Populist leader, in a speech advocating a union between black and white farmers: “You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism that enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.”

According to Woodward, “It is altogether probable that during the brief Populist upheaval in the nineties Negroes and native whites achieved a greater comity of mind and harmony of political purpose than ever before or since in the South.”25

Segregation laws were proposed as part of a deliberate effort to drive a wedge between poor whites and African Americans. These discriminatory barriers were designed to encourage lower-class whites to retain a sense of superiority over blacks, making it far less likely that they would sustain interracial political alliances aimed at toppling the white elite. The laws were, in effect, another racial bribe. As William Julius Wilson has noted, “As long as poor whites directed their hatred and frustration against the black competitor, the planters were relieved of class hostility directed against them.”

But when it became clear that the conservatives would stop at nothing to decimate their alliance, the biracial partnership dissolved, and Populist leaders realigned themselves with conservatives. Even Tom Watson, who had been among the most forceful advocates for an interracial alliance of farmers, concluded that Populist principles could never be fully embraced by the South until blacks were eliminated from politics.

Dominant whites concluded that it was in their political and economic interest to scapegoat blacks, and “permission to hate” came from sources that had formerly denied it,

desegregation across the South ground to a halt. In 1958, thirteen school systems were desegregated; in 1960, only seventeen.

“King was proposing nothing less than a radical transformation of the Civil Rights Movement into a populist crusade calling for redistribution of economic and political power. America’s only civil rights leader was now focusing on class issues and was planning to descend on Washington with an army of poor to shake the foundations of the power structure and force the government to respond to the needs of the ignored underclass.”

Barred by law from invoking race explicitly, those committed to racial hierarchy were forced to search for new means of achieving their goals according to the new rules of American democracy.

Proponents of racial hierarchy found they could install a new racial caste system without violating the law or the new limits of acceptable political discourse by demanding “law and order” rather than “segregation forever.”

In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern states to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order.

Support of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely “rewarding lawbreakers.” For more than a decade—from the mid-1950s until the late 1960s—conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime. Civil rights protests were frequently depicted as criminal rather than political in nature, and federal courts were accused of excessive “lenience” toward lawlessness, thereby contributing to the spread of crime.

“He [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”52 Similarly, John Ehrlichman, special counsel to the president, explained the Nixon administration’s campaign strategy of 1968 in this way: “We’ll go after the racists.”53 In Ehrlichman’s view, “that subliminal appeal to the anti-black voter was always present in Nixon’s statements and speeches.”

Competing images of the poor as “deserving” and “undeserving” became central components of the debate. Ultimately, the racialized nature of this imagery became a crucial resource for conservatives, who succeeded in using law and order rhetoric in their effort to mobilize the resentment of white working-class voters, many of whom felt threatened by the sudden progress of African Americans.

Viewing his own campaign ad, Nixon reportedly remarked with glee that the ad “hits it right on the nose. It’s all about those damn Negro–Puerto Rican groups out there.”

In his campaign for the presidency, Reagan mastered the “excision of the language of race from conservative public discourse” and thus built on the success of earlier conservatives who developed a strategy of exploiting racial hostility or resentment for political gain without making explicit reference to race.

Reagan’s appeal derived primarily from the ideological fervor of the right wing of the Republican Party and “the emotional distress of those who fear or resent the Negro, and who expect Reagan somehow to keep him ‘in his place’ or at least echo their own anger and frustration.”66 To great effect, Reagan echoed white frustration in race-neutral terms through implicit racial appeals. His “colorblind” rhetoric on crime, welfare, taxes, and states’ rights was clearly understood by white (and black) voters as having a racial dimension, though claims to that effect were impossible to prove. The absence of explicitly racist rhetoric afforded the racial nature of his coded appeals a certain plausible deniability.

Reagan’s racially coded rhetoric and strategy proved extraordinarily effective, as 22 percent of all Democrats defected from the party to vote for Reagan. The defection rate shot up to 34 percent among those Democrats who believed civil rights leaders were pushing “too fast.”71

By waging a war on drug users and dealers, Reagan made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined “others”—the undeserving.

The impact of globalization and deindustrialization was felt most strongly in black inner-city communities. As described by William Julius Wilson in his book When Work Disappears, the overwhelming majority of African Americans in the 1970s lacked college educations and had attended racially segregated, underfunded schools lacking basic resources. Those residing in ghetto communities were particularly ill equipped to adapt to the seismic changes taking place in the U.S. economy; they were left isolated and jobless. One study indicates that as late as 1970, more than 70 percent of all blacks working in metropolitan areas held blue-collar jobs.79 Yet by 1987, when the drug war hit high gear, the industrial employment of black men had plummeted to 28 percent.

The decline in legitimate employment opportunities among innercity residents created economic desperation, leading some to sell drugs—most notably crack cocaine.

Crack hit the streets in 1985, a few years after Reagan’s drug war was announced, resulting in a spike in violence as drug markets struggled to stabilize, and the anger and frustration associated with joblessness boiled. Joblessness and crack swept inner cities precisely at the moment that a fierce backlash against the Civil Rights Movement was manifesting itself through the War on Drugs.

Numerous paths were available to our nation in the wake of the crack crisis, yet for reasons traceable largely to racial politics and fear mongering, we chose war. Conservatives found they could finally justify an all-out war on an “enemy” that had been racially defined years before.

Between October 1988 and October 1989, The Washington Post alone ran 1,565 stories about the “drug scourge.” Richard Harwood, the Post’s ombudsmen, eventually admitted the paper had lost “a proper sense of perspective” due to such a “hyperbole epidemic.” He said that “politicians are doing a number on people’s heads.”87 Sociologists Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine later made a similar point: “Crack was a godsend to the Right…. It could not have appeared at a more politically opportune moment.”88

“If we blame crime on crack, our politicians are off the hook. Forgotten are the failed schools, the malign welfare programs, the desolate neighborhoods, the wasted years. Only crack is to blame. One is tempted to think that if crack did not exist, someone somewhere would have received a Federal grant to develop it.”

Among whites, those expressing the highest degree of concern about crime also tend to oppose racial reform, and their punitive attitudes toward crime are largely unrelated to their likelihood of victimization.92 Whites, on average, are more punitive than blacks, despite the fact that blacks are far more likely to be victims of crime. Rural whites are often the most punitive, even though they are least likely to be crime victims.93 The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.

President George Bush Sr., did not hesitate to employ implicit racial appeals, having learned from the success of other conservative politicians that subtle negative references to race could mobilize poor and working-class whites who once were loyal to the Democratic Party.

The level of public concern about crime and drugs was only weakly correlated with actual crime rates, but highly correlated with political initiatives, campaigns, and partisan appeals.

“the Clinton Administration’s ‘tough on crime’ policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state inmate populations of any president in American history.”

“effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor.”

Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born.

there are more people in prisons and jails today just for drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980.