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

by Michelle Alexander

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.