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

Having outlined the history and architecture of mass incarceration in the United States, Alexander now discusses the specific similarities between the Jim Crow era and the United States since the start of the War on Drugs in 1982. In revisiting the severity of the new racial undercaste, she points out that the number of Black men and women under some form of correctional control today is greater than the total number who were enslaved in 1850. An African American child born into slavery was more likely to be raised by his mother and father than one born today. Finally, fewer Black men have the right to vote than in 1870 at the height of Reconstruction. When Black leaders and cultural figures ask where all the Black men have gone, Alexander says the answer is simple: They are lost in a criminal justice system designed to turn them into second-class citizens. Perhaps the reason few notice, she suggests, is that while the system took great effort to build, it takes very little to maintain.

Alexander addresses what she considers a legitimate challenge to her thesis: that a criminal justice system biased against people of color is nothing new. Indeed, America’s earliest prisons were disproportionately filled with Black men, a crisis made even worse after the Fugitive Slave Act made every African American in the North, freed or not, the target of police hunting down enslaved people who had run away. As they do in the War on Drugs, law enforcement officials during Prohibition targeted Black Americans more than whites. Even postconviction pecuniary penalties are a vestige from the colonial era.

Yet what sets the current era apart is that even the most punitive law enforcement initiatives against people of color in the past affected a comparatively small slice of a given population. Now, however, there are whole communities of color across the country in which virtually every member is affected by mass incarceration, either directly or indirectly through a family member or close friend. Perhaps nowhere is this seen more starkly than in Chicago, Illinois.

In charting the parallels between Jim Crow and mass incarceration, Alexander notes their similar political origins. Each scheme of social control began with white elites exploiting the economic resentments and anxieties of working class and poor whites, exacerbating existing racial biases in the process and driving them against people of color to prevent a broader movement of social reform. Both Jim Crow and mass incarceration also result in legalized discrimination and disenfranchised Black voters. She writes:

During Black History Month, Americans congratulate themselves for having put an end to discrimination against African Americans in employment, housing, public benefits, and public accommodations. Schoolchildren wonder out loud how discrimination could ever have been legal in this great land of ours. Rarely are they told that it is still legal (238).

On the topic of disenfranchisement, Alexander points out a disturbing trend in which incarcerated Black Americans count toward the population of the voting district where they serve their sentence, without retaining the right to vote. This reminds the author of the notorious Three Fifths Clause of the US Constitution. Exclusion from juries is another form of civil punishment reminiscent of the Jim Crow era.

The Supreme Court still follows a similar pattern of doing all it can to protect racial caste systems, as it did for many years during both slavery and Jim Crow, only working to dismantle these systems amid dramatic shifts in the social and political status quo. Moreover, the system of mass incarceration is its own extreme form of segregation, as it separates Black men in massive numbers from the rest of the population by keeping them behind bars.

From a more philosophical perspective, mass incarceration resembles Jim Crow in that, like all racial caste systems, it defines what it means to be Black in America. Alexander writes, “Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals” (244). This is particularly convenient in the era of so-called colorblindness when Americans are prohibited from hating Black people but encouraged to hate criminals.

After outlining the similarities, Alexander identifies a few key differences between Jim Crow and mass incarceration. Perhaps most important is the absence of overt racial hostility undergirding mass incarceration. This, however, is a feature of the system rather than something to celebrate. As previously stated, the absence of explicit racism is necessary for the system to maintain itself in a modern America in which overt racial hostility is taboo. Moreover, the racial indifference Alexander perceives in American attitudes toward mass incarceration is equally insidious and harmful.

Another major difference is that whites were almost never victims of the racial caste system of the Jim Crow era. One exception Alexander notes is a hypothetical white woman prohibited from marrying a Black man she loves. Yet this too is in some ways a feature of the system, given that a mass incarceration system that only targeted Black individuals would be deemed an outrage by most Americans. Yet because only 90% of its victims are Black, Americans can plausibly deny that racial control is the driving factor behind mass incarceration. Alexander contrasts the approach taken toward the crack crisis—when users and sellers were overwhelmingly perceived to be Black—and the emergence of anti-drunk driving advocacy around the same time in the 1980s. That movement, which began with grassroots efforts as opposed to federally funded initiatives—and which also reflected a legitimate concern among many Americans—focused on treatment and harm reduction as opposed to incarceration. It is no coincidence that the perpetrators of drunk driving accidents were predominantly white men. She also adds that while alcohol was responsible for 100,000 annual deaths in the late ’80s—22,000 of which were directly attributable to drunk driving—the total number of all drug-related deaths, including from drug violence and AIDS-related complications, was only 21,000.

Another difference involves the effectiveness of what’s known as the politics of respectability in the current era versus the Jim Crow era. In defining the politics of responsibility, Alexander writes, “Supporters of the politics of respectability believe that African Americans, if they hope to be accepted by whites, must conduct themselves in a fashion that elicits respect and sympathy rather than fear and anger from other races” (263). Yet while she grants that this strategy made some sense during the Jim Crow era, given that disenfranchised African Americans could not rely on political power to avoid the threat of the KKK, such an approach is doomed to fail in the era of mass incarceration. Black uplift, as she calls it, is sound and admirable from a personal perspective, but it is no liberation strategy. Everybody makes mistakes, she adds, and so expecting black youth to escape the cycle of mass incarceration by simply never screwing up is too much to ask.

Alexander points out one final frightening difference: that the racial caste systems during slavery and Jim Crow were schemes of labor exploitation, while mass incarceration is designed solely to marginalize Black men. She quotes chilling words from legal scholar John A. Powell, who said, “It’s actually better to be exploited than marginalized, in some respects, because if you’re exploited presumably you’re still needed” (272).