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

by Michelle Alexander

Some countries faced with rising drug crime or seemingly intractable rates of drug abuse and drug addiction chose the path of drug treatment, prevention, education, or economic investment. Portugal, for example, responded to persistent problems of drug addiction and abuse by decriminalizing the possession of all drugs and redirecting the money that would have been spent putting drug users in cages into drug treatment and prevention. Ten years later, Portugal reported that rates of drug abuse and addiction had plummeted, and drug-related crime was on the decline as well.84 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.