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

by Michelle Alexander

point out that the majority of people in state prisons today—52 percent—have been convicted of violent offenses. This statistic is typically treated as a bombshell revelation. How can I argue, they say, that the drug war has been the single greatest contributor to mass incarceration when most people in prison have been convicted of violent crimes? There is an easy answer to this question, but I’ve come to realize that the original edition did not do enough to demystify prison statistics. 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. This may seem confusing or counterintuitive at first, but if you pause to consider how the system actually operates, this fact becomes obvious. 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.