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

by Michelle Alexander

Although some have argued that it’s cumbersome to say “formerly incarcerated” rather than “felon,” or inconvenient to say “a woman in prison” rather than “inmate,” I do not see why anyone who values the dignity of those who have been caged would complain about the “difficulty” or “inconvenience” of uttering a few extra words to emphasize someone’s humanity during the era of mass incarceration. There are many things that are difficult to manage during this period of our nation’s history; avoiding terms that reduce people to prison labels is not one of them.

I also believed—and I still believe—that 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. This was true when I published the book and it remains true today. In 2010, the FBI reported that the “highest number of arrests were for drug abuse violations,” followed by arrests for driving under the influence and larceny-theft.

An arrest (even without a conviction) can have serious consequences, and a criminal conviction of any kind—even if probation rather than imprisonment is imposed—can relegate someone to a permanent second-class status.

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.

As many advocates have pointed out, the distinction between survivors and perpetrators of violence is largely illusory, as virtually no one commits violence without first surviving it.

Since the abolition of slavery, black people have asked for, organized for, and demanded many large-scale interventions that might address poverty, crime, and severe social and economic inequalities. As Carol Anderson explains in White Rage, we have met enormous, sometimes violent, resistance at every turn. We’ve been told that we are undeserving or that necessary programs or public investments are too expensive. Funding for schools, decent housing, job creation, drug treatment, mental health, and trauma support in black communities is almost always in short supply. And yet, our nation has been eager to invest more than a trillion dollars in a drug war that has decimated our families and communities. Police, prisons, and control are the only things that black people have ever asked for and received from this nation, pressed down and running over—to borrow a Biblical phrase. The drug war may have received some black support, but the politics of white supremacy—including fear mongering, scapegoating, and a willingness to invest heavily in racial separation, exclusion, and control (while slashing funds for welfare, education, housing, drug treatment, and more)—is what ultimately gave birth to the new Jim Crow.

tell them we must come to see the system of mass incarceration as a form of organized violence against our communities, rather than a meaningful response to violence committed by individuals within our communities.

We must strive to create a nation in which caging people en masse—digitally or literally—and stripping them of basic civil and human rights for the rest of their lives is not only unnecessary but unthinkable.

Bryan Stevenson has observed that “slavery didn’t end; it evolved.”

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.

Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal.

Makes you think again about the reasons that legislators enacted certain crimes. When you add in the loophole to the 13th amendment, it makes it even more clear because a violation of a vagrancy statute meant you could enslave that person. Even if the law was racially enacted and administered.

From a historical perspective, however, the lack of correlation between crime and punishment is nothing new. Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns.

The colorblind public consensus that prevails in America today—i.e., the widespread belief that race no longer matters—has blinded us to the realities of race in our society and facilitated the emergence of a new caste system.

Jim Crow and slavery were caste systems. So is our current system of mass incarceration.

This larger system, referred to here as mass incarceration, is a system that locks people not only behind actual bars in actual prisons, but also behind virtual bars and virtual walls—walls that are invisible to the naked eye but function nearly as effectively as Jim Crow laws once did at locking people of color into a permanent second-class citizenship. The term mass incarceration refers not only to the criminal justice system but also to the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison.