Thoughts on The New
Jim Crow: Thoughts on Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness, by
Michelle Alexander, The New Press, NY, NY. 2012
This book puts forth the startling idea that the current
system of criminal justice and imprisonment is but the third manifestation of
an intentional strategy designed by American elites to maintain over all white
supremacy and maintain a ready supply of cheap labor, as well as maintain an on-going
hostility between working class whites and African Americans who might otherwise
make common cause. There is nothing startling about the idea that slavery, and then segregation, were consciously designed strategies to accomplish these and other economic, social, and
political goals, but many people who regard themselves as well-informed would
be surprised at the idea that a system akin to slavery and segregation is still
operating in the United States and still causing the same kind of misery,
suffering, and division as those former, and more blatantly evil, institutions.
Put oversimply, this author points out the obvious fact that
convicted felons, even after release, are discriminated against legally,
economically, socially, and politically, just as aspiring black voters were stigmatized in
the segregated south, and slaves before them. The chief instrument for this mass
disenfranchisement, Michelle Armstrong argues, has been the “War on Drugs”, a
systematic network of policies that has resulted in an increase in the U.S.
penal population exploding from “around 300,000 to more than 2 million” since
the mid-1980’s, so that the “United States now has the highest rate of
incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates in nearly every developed
country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China,
and Iran…[and] the United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black
population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.”
To some, the argument advanced here will lack cogency if it
is seen as comparing apples to oranges. It may be argued that segregation and slavery were imposed on Black people, whose only
alternatives were to move to places in the north where segregation was less
institutionalized, or, in the case of slavery, to buy one’s freedom or run
away. The effects of the new Jim Crow, however, can be at least somewhat deflected by
choosing to abstain from the use of illegal drugs. Gains in the American civil rights
movement occurred when the public could no longer ignore the injustice of police
power in the south being used to prevent Black church people from registering
to vote. The same empathy is less engaged by young black males convicted of
using drugs.
As Alexander points out, however, “studies show that people
of all colors use and sell illegal drugs
at remarkably similar rates” yet white youth are far less likely to serve time
in prison for their drug use. This is true for a host of reasons, none of which
involve less strength of character on the part of black youth. Alexander’s
thesis is that the architects of the New Jim Crow have hit upon the ideal
mechanism for maintaining their new system of de facto white supremacy, trading
on the fears of middle class people both white and black, and directing
government and other resources away from health care, economic development, and
recovery programs used by other countries to address drug abuse. Instead,
resources are directed toward the construction of new and larger prisons, and
increasingly, subcontracting their operation to for-profit corporations that have
every motive for resisting any effort that might reduce the number of customers
in the criminal justice pipeline.
I have not yet reached the place in Alexander’s book where
she makes specific proposals. I assume she will advocate an end to the “War on
Drugs” and a change in mandatory sentencing, the drastic expansion of prisons, and
their privatization. But, as Michelle Alexander is quoted by Cornel West in his
Foreword, “It is [a] failure to care, really care across color lines, that lies
at the core of this system of social control and every racial caste system that
has existed…”. 
Even among those who may take issue with aspects of Michelle
Alexander’s analysis, it is hard to see how The
New Jim Crow will not result in a shift toward away from naïve unexamined
assumptions, self-serving rationalizations, and a pervasive “failure to care”.
