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

by Michelle Alexander

Bostick’s search and seizure reflected what had become an increasingly common tactic in the War on Drugs: suspicionless police sweeps of buses in interstate or intrastate travel. The resulting “interviews” of passengers in these dragnet operations usually culminate in a request for “consent” to search the passenger’s luggage.12 Never do the officers inform passengers that they are free to remain silent or to refuse to answer questions. By proceeding systematically in this manner, the police are able to engage in an extremely high volume of searches. One officer was able to search over three thousand bags in a nine-month period employing these techniques.13 By and large, however, the hit rates are low. For example, in one case, a sweep of one hundred buses resulted in only seven arrests.