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

by Michelle Alexander

Today, there is bipartisan support for some prison downsizing, and hundreds of millions of philanthropic dollars have begun to flow toward criminal justice reform. A vibrant movement led by formerly incarcerated and convicted people is on the rise—a movement that has challenged or repealed disenfranchisement laws in several states, mobilized in support of sentencing reform, and successfully organized to “ban the box” on employment applications that discriminate against those with criminal records by asking the dreaded question: “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” Promising movements for restorative and transformative justice have taken hold in numerous cities. Campaigns against cash bail have gained steam. Marijuana legalization has swept the nation, with twenty-five states having legalized or decriminalized cannabis (entirely or partially) since 2010.

Everything has changed. And yet nothing has. The politics of white supremacy, which defined our original constitution, have continued unabated—repeatedly and predictably engendering new systems of racial and social control. Just a few decades ago, politicians vowed to build more prison walls.

studies consistently found that whites were equally likely, if not more likely, than people of color to use and sell illegal drugs. Black men were still labeled the enemy. Nor did it matter, when the drug war was taking off, that nearly all the sensationalized claims that crack cocaine was some kind of “demon drug,” drastically more harmful than powder cocaine, were false or misleading. Black people charged with possession of crack in inner cities were still punished far more harshly than white people in possession of powder cocaine in the suburbs. And it didn’t matter that African Americans weren’t actually taking white people’s jobs or college educations in significant numbers through affirmative action programs. Getting tough on “them”—the racially defined “others” who could easily be used as scapegoats and cast as the enemy—was all that mattered. Facts were treated as largely irrelevant then. As they are now.

the modest criminal justice reforms that were achieved during the Obama administration coincided with the expansion of the system of mass deportation. At the same time that the administration was phasing out federal contracts for private prisons, it was making enormous investments in private detention centers for immigrants, including the granting of a $1 billion contract to Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest prison company (recently renamed Core Civic), to build a massive detention facility for women and children seeking asylum from Central America.

I’ve eliminated terms such as felon, ex-offender, and inmate,

recent years, formerly incarcerated and convicted people have challenged the use of these labels and offered alternatives such as “returning citizen.” A similar effort has been under way to persuade journalists and others to abandon use of the term illegals to describe people who are in this country without proper documentation, and to use the term undocumented immigrant instead.

Books such as Andrea Ritchie’s Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color and Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women by Susan Burton have made invaluable contributions to movements challenging criminal injustice.

Groundbreaking advocacy by organizations including A New Way of Life, BYP100, Families for Justice as Healing, and Essie Justice Group have begun to reshape the narrative, exposing the ways in which mass incarceration has a devastating impact on women and their families—and by extension, their communities. Although men continue to comprise 90 percent of the prison population, women’s incarceration has increased 800 percent over the past thirty years, and the incarceration rate for black women is double that of white women. Today, women are more likely than men to be imprisoned for drug-related offenses—a particularly troubling reality given that 62 percent of women in state prisons have minor children, many of whom are forced into foster care or left with relatives who scarcely have the means to care for them. The separation of families is now widely understood as a human rights crisis at the border, yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the destruction of black families in the era of mass incarceration. One in four women in the United States has a loved one behind bars, and the figure is nearly one in two for black women. When men are locked up, the women who love them are sentenced too—to social isolation, depression, grief, shame, costly legal fees, far-away prison visits (often with children in tow), and the staggering challenges of helping children overcome the trauma of parental incarceration.

the prevailing view that mass incarceration has been driven by arrests and convictions for violent crime is simply wrong. It is a lie that has been invoked to excuse and rationalize the intentional infliction of suffering on millions of people. 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—ranging from schoolyard fist fights to armed robbery to homicide.

Danielle Sered’s recent book, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair.

the system of mass incarceration extends far beyond prison walls—shaming, stigmatizing, and controlling people whether or not they’ve actually spent time behind bars.

The term mass incarceration refers not only to the criminal justice system but also to the web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and outside of prison. Once released, former prisoners enter a hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent social exclusion. They are members of America’s new undercaste.

it is the “prison label, not the prison time” that matters most if we are to understand the true scope and impact of mass incarceration.

Twice as many people are on probation or parole in this country as are locked in literal cages. 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.

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. 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. Fortunately, a growing number of restorative and transformative justice advocates—such as Danielle Sered, Fania Davis, sujatha baliga, and Mariame Kaba—are helping communities to break free of “justice” models that benefit punishment bureaucracies but perpetuate the harms of crime and violence.

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.

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. We must demand reparations for current and past wrongs, open our hearts and minds to one another, and heal our communities as best we can. We must act with great courage, as well as compassion and humility, for none of us has all the answers. Ultimately, our goal must be to reimagine what justice can and should mean in our communities and our nation as a whole, a task that requires the participation and leadership of those who have suffered most. There is no road map, no guidebook. We must make do with the lessons of history and carry forward the struggles of earlier generations, guided by a moral compass that honors the dignity and value of us all.

I did not predict the astonishing increase in the detention and deportation of immigrants. Nor did I imagine that technological advances would quickly render old-fashioned brick-and-mortar prisons largely unnecessary as “e-carceration” turns entire communities into open-air, digital prisons.

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

If you’re lucky enough to be released, an expensive monitoring device will immediately be shackled to your ankle: a GPS tracking device provided by a private company that may charge you up to $300 per month.

we’ve learned how to send people into outer space and how to shrink a powerful computer into a device that fits into the palm of our hand, yet we haven’t yet learned how to face our racial history or how to tell the truth about the devastation wrought by colonialism, militarism, and global capitalism.

According to Human Rights Watch, between 2007 and 2012, post-conviction deportations for simple drug possession increased by 43 percent. In those years, roughly 260,000 non-citizens were evicted from the country having been convicted of drug offenses, 34,000 of whom had marijuana possession as their most serious conviction. Obama attempted to defend mass deportation by claiming that his administration was focused on deporting: “Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids.” But of course, “felons” have families. And “criminals” are often children or teenagers. 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.

Just as the public was initially led to believe that the War on Drugs was focused on “drug kingpins” or “violent offenders”—when the opposite was true—our nation’s current war on immigrants has been advertised as necessary to rid us of “terrorists, gang members, or violent criminals,” when in fact the overwhelming majority of immigrants detained and deported have no criminal record and pose no threat. In 2014, The New York Times found in an investigation of government records that two-thirds of immigrants deported during the Obama administration committed minor infractions, including traffic violations, or had no criminal record at all. Only 20 percent were convicted of more serious crimes or drug offenses.

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

It may be tempting to imagine that ridding our nation of “criminals,” rather than “innocent” people, is perfectly justifiable. But criminality is not truly a limiting principle. All of us make mistakes.

people with race and class privilege are generally shielded from criminal prosecution, even though their crimes often cause far greater harm than the crimes of the poor.

By the end of the crisis, in 2009, median household wealth for all Americans had declined by $27,000, leaving almost 44 million people in poverty. While some banks were eventually prosecuted (and agreed to pay fines that were a small fraction of their profits), the individuals who committed these crimes were typically spared. Despite engaging in forms of criminality that destroyed the lives and wealth of millions, they were not rounded up, dragged away in handcuffs, placed in cages, and then stripped of their basic civil and human rights or shipped to another country. Their mug shots never appeared on the evening news and they never had to wave goodbye to their children in a courtroom, unable to give them a final embrace.

More is required of us in these times. We must learn to care for one another across all boundaries and borders and build a movement of movements rooted in a love so fierce that when a Mexican child is ripped from the arms of his mother at the border, and when a black child is ripped from the arms of her mother as she’s arrested on the streets of New York, and when a white child is ripped from the arms of her mother in a courtroom in Oklahoma, we feel the same pain, the same agony, as though it were our own children. For many of us, it is our own children whose lives are at stake.

Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, greatgrandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like 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, just as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents once were. What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. 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. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans.

issue in the media or a crisis in poor black neighborhoods. A few years after the drug war was declared, crack began to spread rapidly in the poor black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and later emerged in cities across the country.

From the outset, stories circulated on the street that crack and other drugs were being brought into black neighborhoods by the CIA.

The impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than 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.

In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the United States, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000.8 The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature. No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, DC, our nation’s capital, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.

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.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.

It may be surprising to some that drug crime was declining, not rising, when a drug war was declared.

Today, due to recent declines, U.S. crime rates have dipped below the international norm. Nevertheless, the United States now boasts an incarceration rate that is six to ten times greater than that of other industrialized nations16—a development directly traceable to the drug war.

The current system of control depends on black exceptionalism; it is not disproved or undermined by it.

Merely reducing sentence length, by itself, does not disturb the basic architecture of the New Jim Crow.

American Indians were considered unsuitable as slaves, largely because native tribes were clearly in a position to fight back. The fear of raids by Indian tribes led plantation owners to grasp for an alternative source of free labor. European immigrants were also deemed poor candidates for slavery, not because of their race, but rather because they were in short supply and enslavement would, quite naturally, interfere with voluntary immigration to the new colonies. Plantation owners thus viewed Africans, who were relatively powerless, as the ideal slaves.

Although slaves clearly occupied the lowest position in the social hierarchy and suffered the most under the plantation system, the condition of indentured whites was barely better, and the majority of free whites lived in extreme poverty.

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.

Fearful that such measures might not be sufficient to protect their interests, the planter class took an additional precautionary step, a step that would later come to be known as a “racial bribe.” Deliberately and strategically, the planter class extended special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves.

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.

The history of racial caste in the United States would end with the Civil War if the idea of race and racial difference had died when the institution of slavery was put to rest.

White supremacy, over time, became a religion of sorts. Faith in the idea that people of the African race were bestial, that whites were inherently superior, and that slavery was, in fact, for blacks’ own good, served to alleviate the white conscience and reconcile the tension between slavery and the democratic ideals espoused by whites in the so-called New World.

Nine Southern states adopted vagrancy laws—which essentially made it a criminal offense not to work and were applied selectively to blacks—and eight of those states enacted convict laws allowing for the hiring-out of people in county prisons to plantation owners and private companies.

In 1867, at the dawn of the Reconstruction Era, no black man held political office in the South, yet three years later, at least 15 percent of all Southern elected officials were black.