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

by Michelle Alexander

if a black man were elected president of the United States, our nation would sink further into denial, and no one would listen to the message that I felt desperate to convey: We are not free of our racial history.

To the contrary, a new caste system has been born again in America, a system of mass incarceration unlike anything the world has ever seen.

devoted following of millions of people who proudly say they want to “make America great again” by taking us back to a time that we’ve left behind.

Every system of injustice depends on the silence, paralysis, confusion, and cooperation of those it seeks to eliminate or control.

Everything has changed. And yet nothing has.

whites were equally likely, if not more likely, than people of color to use and sell illegal drugs. Black men were still labeled the enemy.

Black people charged with possession of crack in inner cities were still punished far more harshly than white people in possession of powder cocaine in the suburbs.

Obama was the first sitting president to visit a federal corrections facility, the first to oversee a drop in the federal prison population in more than thirty years, and he granted clemency to nearly two thousand people behind bars—the highest total for any president since President Harry Truman. His administration enacted significant policy changes, including, among others, legislation reducing sentencing disparities involving crack and powder cocaine, a temporary ban on federal contracts with private prisons, and limitations on the transfer of military equipment to local police departments.

people have challenged the use of these labels and offered alternatives such as “returning citizen.”

undocumented immigrant

“formerly incarcerated” rather than “felon,”

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.

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.

Stay within that system

Those who define “mass incarceration” narrowly, to include only individuals currently locked in prisons or jails, erase from public view the overwhelming majority of people ensnared by the system. Twice as many people are on probation or parole in this country as are locked in literal cages.

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.

America has the highest incarceration rate as an industrialized country - Russia is far behind

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.

The safest communities are not the ones with the most police, prisons, or electronic monitors, but the ones with quality schools, health care, housing, plentiful jobs, and strong social networks that allow families not merely to survive but to thrive.

White people are generally allowed to have problems, and they’ve historically been granted the power to define and respond to them. But people of color—in this “land of the free” forged through slavery and genocide—are regularly viewed and treated as the problem.

including the GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies—have entered into private contracts with government agencies to provide electronic monitoring of people suspected or convicted of crimes in thirty-eight states, for a combined annual revenue of almost $700 million.

Companies that earned millions on contracts to run or serve prisons are now poised to earn billions through the surveillance and monitoring of the same population.

large numbers of Latinos are being misclassified as white, distorting the data.

“slavery didn’t end; it evolved.”

Today, we can see, in real time, the system of mass incarceration evolving before our eyes, as enormous investments are made in immigrant detention centers and digital prisons, and as growing numbers of white people become collateral damage in a war that was declared with black people in mind.

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.

Rationalizing mass incarceration or mass deportation on the grounds that it is meant to rid our nation of “criminals” perpetuates the false notion that “criminals” are a monolithic, deviant group that is fundamentally different than “us” and therefore unworthy of our concern. They can be eliminated without a second thought.

One of the lessons of recent decades is that racial caste systems can grow and thrive even when our elected leaders claim to be progressive and espouse the rhetoric of equality, inclusion, and civil rights. President Bill Clinton, who publicly aligned himself with the black community and black leaders, escalated the racially discriminatory drug war in part to avoid being cast by conservatives as “soft on crime.” Similarly, President Obama publicly preached values of inclusion and compassion toward immigrants, yet he escalated the detention and deportation of non-citizens.

Need to dismantle 2 party system, in order to make significant progress

African Americans constitute 80 to 90 percent of all those sent to prison on drug charges.

In at least fifteen states, blacks are admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate from twenty to fifty-seven times greater than that of white men.4 In fact, nationwide, the rate of incarceration for African Americans convicted of drug offenses dwarfs the rate of whites.

whites and that white youth were actually the most likely of any racial or ethnic group to be guilty of illegal drug possession and sales. Any notion that drug use among blacks is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data; white youth have about three times the number of drug-related emergency room visits as their African American counterparts.14

The notion that whites comprise the vast majority of drug users and dealers—and may well be more likely than other racial groups to commit drug crimes—may seem implausible to some, given the media imagery we are fed on a daily basis and the racial composition of our prisons and jails.

Whites tend to sell to whites; blacks to blacks.15 University students tend to sell to each other.16 Rural whites, for their part, don’t make a special trip to the ’hood to purchase marijuana. They buy it from somebody down the road.17 White high school students typically buy drugs from white classmates, friends, or older relatives.

“it was from a student of their own race generally.”

The notion that most illegal drug use and sales happens in the ghetto is pure fiction. Drug trafficking occurs there, but it occurs everywhere else in America as well. Nevertheless, black men have been admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is more than thirteen times higher than that of white men.19 The

The general public seems to imagine that our prisons are filled with “rapists and murderers,” but they actually account for a small minority of our nation’s prison population.

The study found that defendants charged with killing white victims received the death penalty eleven times more often than defendants charged with killing black victims. Georgia prosecutors seemed largely to blame for the disparity; they sought the death penalty in 70 percent of cases involving black defendants and white victims, but only 19 percent of cases involving white defendants and black victims.

defendants charged with killing white victims were 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than defendants charged with killing blacks. Black defendants, like McCleskey, who killed white victims had the highest chance of being sentenced to death in Georgia.

Thirteen days later, the Georgia Supreme Court reversed itself, holding that the fact that 98.4 percent of the defendants selected to receive life sentences for repeat drug offenses were black required no justification.