The New Jim Crow

Editor's note: On April 15 Michelle Alexander gave a talk in Berkeley, Calif., on her new book, The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, London: The New Press, 2010). Readers of "Black/Red View" will remember John Alan's column on the "Oakland Riders" trial (see "Racism in California" Nov. 2003 N&L). Below we print a summary of Ms. Alexander's talk.

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Most people who have not been to prison are skeptical about it being the new system of racial control. I was. I was not ignorant of institutional racism. I had been a civil rights lawyer with the ACLU for years, suing large companies for bias. Then I shifted my focus to the criminal justice system. By the time I left the ACLU, I knew mass incarceration does in fact function as the new Jim Crow laws.

One particular incident convinced me. As the director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California I was documenting incidents of racial profiling. One young man brought in his detailed notes on the many times he was stopped and harassed, sometimes multiple times in the same day! I thought he would make a good plaintiff because of the meticulous, documented details of his story.

Then I realized he had a felony conviction. I tried to explain that we could not use him, that the trial would focus on his conviction, not his experiences of racial profiling. He became upset, telling me I'm treating him no better than the police, not letting him be heard. His conviction was on a trumped-up charge and was a part of his story. I felt I was right. After all, racial justice work has a long tradition of carefully screening who would become the plaintiff in the legal case.

But that does not work now. A few months later the "Oakland Riders" scandal broke, and police planting drugs on African-American suspects in possibly thousands of cases was brought to light. One of those named was the officer whom the young man identified as having framed him. He was right, and I was wrong.

More African-American men are under the criminal justice system's control than were enslaved in the 1850s, before the Civil War. The majority of African-American men have a criminal record, locking them into a second-class structure for life. We use the criminal justice system to label people of color "criminals" and then proceed to discriminate against them in all the ways we did in the past...

But it is only in the last 30 years that the prison population has quintupled. Over two million people are now under the control of the criminal justice system, and a million people are employed by it.

The drug war, not crime, is the engine of incarceration. The goal of the drug war is not to weed out drug "kingpins" or violent offenders, as we are told. Local law enforcement gets rewarded for the number arrested, not the kind of offense they commit.

The drug war has been waged almost exclusively in communities of color, even though study after study shows that drugs are available just as much in white communities...

There are many similarities between Jim Crow and mass incarceration as a system of racial control:

• many states deny felons the right to vote
• employment discrimination: not only can't you get a job, but many professional licenses, such as for barbers, have such restrictions, too
• not only can felons not get assisted housing, relatives risk eviction if they dare to have them stay public assistance,
• food stamps, healthcare, and many other benefits are not available to a felon

The system is designed to return you to prison, and 70% of former prisoners do return, usually within a couple of months.

Nothing short of a broad-based social movement can address this problem. Such a movement has to be multi-racial: Latinos and women, especially women of color, are the fastest growing segment of the prison population. If we don't create care and compassion across racial lines, then, even if this system collapses, we will recreate it in another form.

We can't wait for a movement to arise and then join it. It has to begin with us. We have to break the silence. There is such a stigma attached to being in prison that it is hard to talk about your own or your loved one's criminal history. We have to start talking about it in all communities, to all audiences.

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