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

by Michelle Alexander

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.

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

throughout our nation’s history, when crime and immigration have been perceived as white, our nation’s response has been radically different from when those phenomena have been defined as black or brown.

these systems grew with relatively little political resistance because people of all colors were willing to tolerate the disposal of millions of individuals once they had been labeled criminals in the media and political discourse.

Once they are released, they are often denied the right to vote, excluded from juries, and relegated to a racially segregated and subordinated existence. Through a web of laws, regulations, and informal rules, all of which are powerfully reinforced by social stigma, they are confined to the margins of mainstream society and denied access to the mainstream economy. They are legally denied the ability to obtain employment, housing, and public benefits—much

Once released from prison, people enter a hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent social exclusion. They are members of America’s new undercaste.

The system of mass incarceration is based on the prison label, not prison time.

History reveals that the seeds of the new system of control were planted well before the end of the Civil Rights Movement. A new race-neutral language was developed for appealing to old racist sentiments, a language accompanied by a political movement that succeeded in putting the vast majority of blacks back in their place. 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.”

Prior to 1970, inner-city workers with relatively little formal education could find industrial employment close to home. Globalization, however, helped to change that. Manufacturing jobs were transferred by multinational corporations away from American cities to countries that lacked unions, where workers earn a small fraction of what is considered a fair wage in the United States.

“the value of a mandatory minimum sentence lies not in its imposition, but in its value as a bargaining chip to be given away in return for the resource-saving plea from the defendant to a more leniently sanctioned charge.” Describing severe mandatory sentences as a bargaining chip is a major understatement, given its potential for extracting guilty pleas from people who are innocent of any crime.