The New Jim Crow: Race, Mass Incarceration, and Drug Policy

Introduction: Alexander's Background and Central Thesis

Michelle Alexander does not claim full credit for the striking title of her book The New Jim Crow, recounting having first seen the slogan on a "bright orange poster" in 1998.¹ A former ACLU attorney turned law professor, Alexander had always been aware of the need for criminal justice reform. She headed the ACLU Racial Justice Project, but it took that bright orange poster to help her draw the connection between drug policy and race-related social justice issues in America. Her initial research revealed that up to three-quarters of the prison terms being served for drug offenses are by Black or Latino individuals, even though the "majority of the country's illegal drug users and dealers are white."²

Alexander herself is biracial, with a white mother and a Black father. She experienced discrimination from an early age, an experience that forced her family out of their community. These childhood encounters fueled her racial awareness and prompted her to pursue a career as a civil rights attorney.

After investigating the connection between the War on Drugs and racial disparities in the criminal justice system, Alexander focused more firmly on mass incarceration. The title The New Jim Crow refers to the fact that the War on Drugs is, in her view, a racist response to the Civil Rights movement — just as the original Jim Crow laws were a direct response to emancipation. Rhetoric surrounding the War on Drugs drove fear deep into the American public consciousness, centering on inner-city urban communities filled with African Americans using and selling drugs. These narratives represented gross distortions of the truth, much as Jim Crow propaganda presented Black men as moral threats to an otherwise innocent white society.

The War on Drugs as a Racial Caste System

In The New Jim Crow, Alexander argues that mass incarceration is a sinister means of social control and a subtle method of subverting anti-discrimination laws and norms. She points out that labeling a person a felon effectively legalizes forms of discrimination that would otherwise be illegal, including "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."³ Alexander calls mass incarceration the primary mechanism for enforcing a caste system in America.

Most remarkably, Alexander claims that the creation of this racial caste system is deliberate — part of a coordinated strategy engineered by the same demographic that would have supported Jim Crow several generations earlier. Essentially, Jim Crow — and even slavery itself — had been rebranded. The media became the mouthpiece for a moral panic, and together with political rhetoric and misleading statistics, the majority of Americans were persuaded that the War on Drugs was keeping the country safe. In fact, responding to drug-related conduct with excessive measures such as incarceration and the lifelong penalties associated with felon status does nothing to improve public health, public safety, or quality of life.

Mass Incarceration, Felon Status, and Legal Discrimination

Based on its extensive impact on American lives, mass incarceration is both a civil rights issue and a human rights issue. It is not, Alexander insists, a straightforward response to increased crime rates; the notion that crime levels automatically drive incarceration rates is a myth. Alexander notes that "especially black incarceration rates have soared regardless of whether crime is going up or down in any given community or the nation as a whole."⁴

In fact, Alexander traces the genesis of the War on Drugs — and its corresponding effect on punitive incarceration policies — to the Civil Rights movement itself. In the wake of desegregation and hard-won legal victories for civil rights, many poor and working-class, largely conservative segments of the white population found a new scapegoat. The Civil Rights movement planted the idea, deep within the white working-class psyche, that social, cultural, and economic capital in America would now be shared among all citizens. Fearing the loss of power and social status, many white Americans shifted their political allegiances from the Democratic Party and its robust social services platform toward an increasingly conservative Republican Party.⁵ At the helm of the Republican Party during this period was Richard Nixon, who effectively launched the War on Drugs. Segregationists and those who had viewed civil rights protesters as disorderly had long sought a new means of preserving the social order that had existed for generations.

Conclusion: Changing Norms and Policy

Since its release, The New Jim Crow has sparked increased public dialogue about mass incarceration. The only way the system can fundamentally change is if social norms shift, so that the next generation or two of voters responds at the polls. There will always be those who believe that tough-on-crime policies are necessary or effective. The focus should instead be on reaching rational thinkers who can recognize, based on historical patterns and social science evidence, that mass incarceration is counterproductive. Policy ultimately needs to change — but it will only change in response to shifts in public attitudes.

Bibliography

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. New York: The New Press, 2010.

Childress, Sarah. "Michelle Alexander: 'A System of Racial and Social Control.'" PBS Frontline. April 29, 2014. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/michelle-alexander-a-system-of-racial-and-social-control/

Cooper, Arnie. "Throwing Away the Key." The Sun. February 2011. https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/422/throwing-away-the-key