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

by Michelle Alexander

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.

We are now living in an era of unabashed racialism, a time when many white Americans feel free to speak openly of their nostalgia for an age when their cultural, political, and economic dominance could be taken for granted—no apologies required. It can no longer be denied that the colorblind veneer of early twenty-first-century American democracy was just that: a veneer. Right beneath the surface lay an ugly reality that many Americans were not prepared to face.

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

The reality is this: the fact that half of a state’s prison population is comprised of people labeled violent offenders does not mean that half of the people sentenced to prison in that state have been convicted of violent crimes.

People who are convicted of violent crimes tend to get longer prison sentences than those who commit nonviolent offenses. As a result, people who are classified as violent offenders comprise a much larger share of the prison population than they would if they had shorter sentences.

The lie that most people sent to prison are “violent offenders” is dangerous because it perpetuates the false notion that our system of mass incarceration is primarily concerned with violence and that it is well designed to keep communities safe.

In fact, our system is primarily concerned with the perpetual control and marginalization of the dispossessed; it is not designed to respond meaningfully to the harms of violence—a reality powerfully described in Danielle Sered’s recent book, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair.

how the system of mass incarceration multiplies, rather than remedies, the harm of violent crime.

It may be helpful, in attempting to understand the basic nature of the new caste system, to think of the criminal justice system—the entire collection of institutions and practices that comprise it—not as an independent system but rather as a gateway into a much larger system of racial stigmatization and permanent marginalization. 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 web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and outside of prison. Once released, former prisoners enter a hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent social exclusion. They are members of America’s new undercaste. (Emphasis in original.)

This war did not merely increase the number of people in prisons and jails. It radically altered the life course of millions, especially black men who were the primary targets in the early decades of the war.

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.

Reflexively locking people in cages and subjecting them to degradation and humiliation—inflicting violence and suffering upon people in order to teach them that violence is wrong—is a doomed strategy, especially considering that most people who commit violent crime are victims as well.

If we want to reduce violence in our communities, we need to hold people accountable in ways that aim to repair and prevent harm rather than simply inflicting ...

Violence in struggling black communities is deeply rooted in conditions beyond the direct control of the individuals who live there, including the profound inequalities and indignities created by the legacies of slavery, segregation, ghet-toization, and widespread legal discrimination and stigmatization in the era of mass incarceration. Violence is also traceable to the brutalities of global capitalism.

When factories closed and moved overseas, work suddenly disappeared from segregated communities in inner cities, plunging them into economic collapse. Despair and violence predictably flared. Our nation could have responded with a wave of care and concern—with stimulus packages, bail-out plans, and major investments in education and job creation—but instead we declared war. Like all wars, the War on Drugs has been cruel and unforgiving.

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.

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.

The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms, we’ve learned how to send people into outer space and how to shrink a powerful computer into a device that fits into the palm of our hand, yet we haven’t yet learned how to face our racial history or how to tell the truth about the devastation wrought by colonialism, militarism, and global capitalism. We’ve learned how to develop powerful surveillance systems and how to build missiles that can reach halfway around the globe. But what have we learned about the true meaning of justice?

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.

Karakatsanis observes in Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System, people with race and class privilege are generally shielded from criminal prosecution, even though their crimes often cause far greater harm than the crimes of the poor.

“Employees at banks committed crimes including lying to investigators and regulators, fraudulently portraying junk assets as valuable assets, rate-rigging, bribing foreign officials, submitting false documents, mortgage fraud, fraudulent home foreclosures, financing drug cartels, orchestrating and enabling widespread tax evasion, and violating international sanctions.” The massive criminality caused enormous harm. African Americans lost over half their wealth due to the collapse of real estate markets and the financial crisis. By the end of the crisis, in 2009, median household wealth for all Americans had declined by $27,000, leaving almost 44 million people in poverty. While some banks were eventually prosecuted (and agreed to pay fines that were a small fraction of their profits), the individuals who committed these crimes were typically spared. Despite engaging in forms of criminality that destroyed the lives and wealth of millions, they were not rounded up, dragged away in handcuffs, placed in cages, and then stripped of their basic civil and human rights or shipped to another country. Their mug shots never appeared on the evening news and they never had to wave goodbye to their children in a courtroom, unable to give them a final embrace.

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.

those who profit from the suffering of others will never hesitate to profit from our suffering when the opportunity arises.

Similarly, key provisions in the Patriot Act, which allowed the government to search homes without notifying their owners or residents and which were advertised as necessary to root out Muslim terrorists following 9/11, wound up being used primarily in drug law enforcement—not terrorism investigations.

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. As a criminal, you are afforded scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

The CIA admitted in 1998 that guerrilla armies it actively supported in Nicaragua were smuggling illegal drugs into the United States—drugs that were making their way onto the streets of inner-city black neighborhoods in the form of crack cocaine. The CIA also admitted that, in the midst of the War on Drugs, it blocked law enforcement efforts to investigate illegal drug networks that were helping to fund its covert war in Nicaragua.5

The impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase.7

The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran.

In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the United States, the rate is roughly eigh...

No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.

Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.10

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.

This recommendation was based on their finding that “the prison, the reformatory and the jail have achieved only a shocking record of failure. There is overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it.”

Merely reducing sentence length, by itself, does not disturb the basic architecture of the New Jim Crow. So long as large numbers of African Americans continue to be arrested and labeled drug criminals, they will continue to be relegated to a permanent second-class

status upon their release, no matter how much (or how little) time they spend behind bars. The system of mass incarceration is based on the prison label, not prison time.

The most ardent proponents of racial hierarchy have consistently succeeded in implementing new racial caste systems by triggering a collapse of resistance across the political spectrum. This feat has been achieved largely by appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower-class whites, a group of people who are understandably eager to ensure that they never find themselves trapped at the bottom of the American hierarchy.

There was no contradiction in the bold claim made by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” if Africans were not really people.

Most white people believed African Americans lacked the proper motivation to work, prompting the provisional Southern legislatures to adopt the notorious black codes. As expressed by one Alabama planter: “We have the power to pass stringent police laws to govern the Negroes—this is a blessing—for they must be controlled in some way or white people cannot live among them.”

Nine Southern states adopted vagrancy laws—which essentially made it a criminal offense not to work and were applied selectively to blacks—and eight of those states enacted convict laws allowing for the hiring-out of people in county prisons to plantation owners and private companies. People trapped in this system were forced to work for little or no pay. One vagrancy act specifically provided that “all free negroes and mulattoes over the age of eighteen” must have written proof of a job at the beginning of every year. Those found with no lawful employment were deemed vagrants and convicted. Clearly, the purpose of the black codes in general and the vagrancy laws in particular was to establish another system of forced labor.

Ultimately, the black codes were overturned, and a slew of federal civil rights legislation protecting the newly freed slaves was passed during the relatively brief but extraordinary period of black advancement known as the Reconstruction Era.

At the same time, however, many of the new civil rights laws were proving largely symbolic.16 Notably absent from the Fifteenth Amendment, for example, was language prohibiting the states from imposing educational, residential, or other qualifications for voting, thus leaving the door open to the states to impose poll taxes, literacy tests, and other devices to prevent blacks from voting.

Most blacks were too poor to sue to enforce their civil rights, and no organization like the NAACP yet existed to spread the risks and costs of litigation. Moreover, the threat of violence often deterred blacks from pressing legitimate claims, making the “civil rights” of former slaves largely illusory—existing on paper but rarely to be found in real life.

As William Julius Wilson has noted, “As long as poor whites directed their hatred and frustration against the black competitor, the planters were relieved of class hostility directed against them.”26 Indeed, in order to overcome the well-founded suspicions of poor and illiterate whites that they, as well as blacks, were in danger of losing the right to vote, the leaders of the movement pursued an aggressive campaign of white supremacy in every state prior to black disenfranchisement.

Reconstruction is most typically described as stretching from 1863, when the North freed the slaves, to 1877, when it abandoned them and withdrew federal troops from the South. There is much less certainty regarding the beginning of the end of Jim Crow.

Brown v. Board of Education was unique, however. It signaled the end of “home rule” in the South with respect to racial affairs. Earlier decisions had chipped away at the “separate but equal” doctrine, yet Jim Crow had managed to adapt to the changing legal environment, and most Southerners had remained confident that the institution would survive.

After more than fifty years of nearly complete deference to Southern states and noninterference in their racial affairs, Brown suggested a reversal in course. A mood of outrage and defiance swept the South, not unlike the reaction to emancipation and Reconstruction following the Civil War. Again, racial equality was being forced upon the South by the federal government, and by 1956, Southern white opposition to desegregation mushroomed into a vicious backlash. In Congress, North Carolina senator Sam Ervin Jr. drafted a racist polemic, the “Southern Manifesto,” which vowed to fight to maintain Jim Crow by all legal means. Ervin succeeded in obtaining the support of 101 out of 128 members of Congress from the eleven original Confederate states.

Just as Southern legislatures had passed the black codes in response to the early steps of Reconstruction, in the years immediately following Brown v. Board, five Southern legislatures passed nearly fifty new Jim Crow laws. In the streets, resistance turned violent. The Ku Klux Klan reasserted itself as a powerful terrorist organization, committing castrations, killings, and the bombing of black homes and churches. NAACP leaders were beaten, pistol-whipped, and shot.

As quickly as it began, desegregation across the South ground to a halt. In 1958, thirteen school systems were desegregated; in 1960, only seventeen.

Yet in the 1950s, a civil rights movement was brewing, emboldened by the Supreme Court’s decisions and a shifting domestic and international political environment. With extraordinary bravery, civil rights leaders, activists, and progressive clergy launched boycotts, marches, and sit-ins protesting the Jim Crow system. They endured fire hoses, police dogs, bombings, and beatings by white mobs, as well as by the police. Once again, federal troops were sent to the South to provide protection for blacks attempting to exercise their civil rights, and the violent reaction of white racists was met with horror in the North.