I’ve just finished reading Michelle Alexander’s remarkable book, The New Jim Crow. I attempted to read it the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college and, while I was equally angered and inspired the first time, I definitely missed (or lacked the intellectual maturity to understand) many of the nuances of her arguments.
Alexander’s account of the modern criminal justice system provides the crucial why and how to explain the rise of mass incarceration, notably through the War on Drugs, and its role in producing racial caste in America–the relegation and locking in of stigmatized racial groups into an inferior, second-class citizenship by law and custom (12). Her argument is that in each generation, new tactics have been used for achieving the same goals, and, in particular, she demonstrates how the criminalization of black men in America has resulted in disenfranchisement, segregation, and subordination comparable to the Jim Crow Era. In chapter 5, she draws the parallels between the two systems of social control and argues that: both were born out of a political desire to exploit the resentment and vulnerabilities of poor and working-class whites, legalized and legitimized discrimination, resulted in political disenfranchisement (voting), resulted in exclusion from juries (which in turn facilitated the expansion of social control), expanded and encouraged racial segregation, and contributed to the symbolic production of race. Despite these similarities, I think that the strength of Alexander’s analysis comes from her careful analysis of the limits to analogy, which she identifies as: the lack of explicit racial bias/image of facial neutrality in today’s system of mass incarceration, inclusion of white victims of mass incarceration where there were arguably fewer under Jim Crow (with the exception being miscegenation), and that unlike Jim Crow laws, there is in fact strong black support for “get tough” policies. She refers to this final difference as the “dual frustration with law enforcement and crime”–the idea that black communities would like the government/police to respond to crime but that under the current system this response will result in the further dismantling of communities.
What I find especially compelling about the book overall is Alexander’s detailed account of the mechanics of the law, specifically how racial biases have been perpetuated and upheld at all stages of the criminal justice process by major supreme court decisions (notably the interpretation of the 4th and 14th amendments and qualifications for establishing “explicit” racial bias established by McCkleskey v. Kemp [pg. 109-111]) and how these barriers in turn make naming mass incarceration as a system of racial caste nearly impossible and by extension how the New Jim Crow can never be dismantled through traditional litigation and policy-reform strategies that are wholly disconnected from a major social movement (15). Indeed she says:
If we hope to end this system of social control, we cannot be satisfied with a handful of reforms. All of the financial incentives granted to law enforcement to arrest poor black and brown people for drug offenses must be revoked. Federal grant money for drug enforcement must end; drug forfeiture laws must be stripped from the books; racial profiling must be eradicated; the concentration of drug busts in poor communities of color must cease; and the transfer of military equipment and aid to local law enforcement agencies waging the drug war must come to a screeching halt. And that for starters (233).
