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

by Michelle Alexander

In the 1890s, Populists buckled under the political pressure created by the Redeemers, who had successfully appealed to poor and working-class whites by proposing overtly racist and increasingly absurd Jim Crow laws. Now, a new racial caste system—mass incarceration—was taking hold, as politicians of every stripe competed with each other to win the votes of poor and working-class whites, whose economic status was precarious, at best, and who felt threatened by racial reforms. As had happened before, former allies of African Americans—as much as conservatives—adopted a political strategy that required them to prove how “tough” they could be on “them,” the dark-skinned pariahs. The results were immediate. As law enforcement budgets exploded, so did prison and jail populations. In 1991, the Sentencing Project reported that the number of people behind bars in the United States was unprecedented in world history, and that one-fourth of young African American men were now under the control of the criminal justice system. Despite the jaw-dropping impact of the “get-tough” movement on the African American community, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans revealed any inclination to slow the pace of incarceration.