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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2010

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Preface-Introduction

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Preface-IntroductionChapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface to the 10th Anniversary Edition Summary

In 2020, 10 years after the original publication of The New Jim Crow, Alexander reflects on the dramatic political and cultural changes of the preceding decade. Since then, Americans have mourned the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and countless other people of color, all of whom aside from Martin died either at the hands of the police or, in Bland’s case, while under police supervision. Deaths like these are nothing new. What is new is the fact that they have become staples on the nightly news and on social media. The last 10 years also saw the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and a series of uprisings catalyzed by the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Brown’s death by police officers. These tragedies set the stage for an end to the era of colorblindness and race-denial, an era Alexander argues was perpetuated by Barack Obama’s election win.

Yet the forces at work to end colorblindness flowed along another vector, one that culminated in the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Since Trump’s election win, Alexander writes that we now live in “an era of unabashed racialism, a time when many white Americans feel free to speak openly of their nostalgia for an age when their cultural, political, and economic dominance could be taken for granted” (xi). She attributes this largely to Trump’s open embrace of white nationalist rhetoric.

Meanwhile, Alexander is heartened by the emergence of vibrant activism groups and bipartisan calls to downsize prisons. She also celebrates the fact that marijuana is either legal or decriminalized in 27 states, up from only two states in 2010. Several states have repealed disenfranchisement laws for the formerly incarcerated, and countless employers have ceased asking applicants about their felony records as part of the “ban the box” campaign.

Yet in response to these reforms and shifts in public opinion, the profiteers of mass incarceration have simply evolved. Alexander writes, “Just a few decades ago, politicians vowed to build more prison walls. Today, they promise border walls” (xiv). The same political strategy used to demonize Black men throughout the War on Drugs is now utilized against Latinx immigrants, undocumented or otherwise. This unfortunately comes at a time when the racial dog whistles of the 1980s and ’90s are replaced by “bullhorns” (xiv) thanks to the politics of Trumpism. Alexander points to Trump’s infamous campaign announcement speech in which he proclaimed that Mexican immigrants are largely rapists and drug criminals. While the prevailing rhetoric may be more overtly racist under Trump, Alexander points out that the Obama administration granted a $1 billion contract to the largest US prison company to build a detention facility for Central American asylum-seekers. Obama also oversaw a massive increase in deportations, deporting 3.2 million people compared to the 2 million deported under President George W. Bush.

If Alexander were to write an updated version of The New Jim Crow, she says it would focus on the relationship between mass incarceration and mass deportation. She would also explore how the federal government’s treatment-focused response to the opioid crisis—a scourge that very visibly affects white Americans—differs from its highly punitive response to the crack crisis.

Alexander ends the Preface by addressing some of the most common questions and concerns she hears from readers regarding The New Jim Crow. To the point that she predominantly focuses on the experiences of Black men as opposed to Black women, Alexander admits that during her time as a lawyer at the ACLU of Northern California, most of those she represented were Black men. Moreover, she writes, men comprise 90% of the US prison population. That said, she points to a wide body of scholarship devoted to the experience of Black women in the criminal justice system, including Andrea Ritchie’s Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (2017). Alexander also addresses the book’s focus on nonviolent crime. Her decision to omit a chapter on violent crime stemmed from a desire to counter prevailing myths about black-on-black crime and to shift the conversation toward state violence and how the criminal justice system in fact increases crime committed by individuals.

Finally, Alexander points out some of the more troubling developments in the criminal justice system, including e-carceration, which uses electronic monitoring equipment to detain individuals in their home or neighborhood.

Introduction Summary

Alexander’s investigation into the effects of mass incarceration began in the late 1990s when she came across a poster that read, “THE DRUG WAR IS THE NEW JIM CROW” (4). As the newly installed director of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Project in Northern California, Alexander was deeply concerned about racial bias in the criminal justice system. That said, she initially found it absurd and hyperbolic to compare the current era of mass incarceration to the days of Jim Crow, during which legal segregation and racist voting laws systematically turned Black Southerners into second-class citizens.

Before long, however, Alexander came to believe that such comparisons are not so far-fetched. Those convicted of felonies suffer employment discrimination, housing discrimination, jury exclusion, denial of public benefits like food stamps, and often denial of the right to vote. She writes, “As a criminal, you are afforded scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it” (2).

Alexander cites several startling statistics surrounding mass incarceration in the United States. Since the 1980s, the country’s penal population rose from 300,000 to over 2 million, with most of this increase attributed to drug convictions. Even though crime rates in Finland, Germany, and the United States were roughly equal between 1960 and 1990, the US incarceration rate quadrupled over that period, while incarceration remained steady or declined in those other countries. Even though whites sell and use drugs at close to the same rates as people of color, Black men have overwhelmingly borne the costs of America’s War on Drugs. In fact, the percentage of the Black population imprisoned in the United States exceeds that of South Africa during the worst years of apartheid.

To a large extent, Alexander targets the book’s message at her fellow civil rights lawyers and activists, who she believes are wrong to focus their efforts on initiatives like affirmation action as opposed to mass incarceration. She likens the current state of civil rights activism to a hypothetical scenario in which the activists of the 1950s and ’60s ignored segregation as the primary target of their reform efforts. Finally, Alexander emphasizes that when she writes about the victims of mass incarceration, she means not only those presently incarcerated but also those on parole and probation, along with anyone else forced to live with what she calls “the prison label” affixed to them (17).

Preface-Introduction Analysis

In reading the Preface to the 10-year anniversary edition of The New Jim Crow, one is struck by how much has changed between 2010 and 2020. Alexander published the anniversary edition in January 2020; the tragic killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin that May sparked massive multiweek protests in cities across the country, galvanizing an already growing and vibrant racial justice movement led by organizations like Black Like Matters. Moreover, Floyd’s death and the ensuing outpouring of anger reshaped the mainstream conversation surrounding criminal justice reform, as scholars, activists, journalists, and laypeople debated calls to redefine the role played by the police in American society.

While individual acts of police brutality are largely outside the purview of The New Jim Crow, it is instructive to look to Alexander’s other writings on the topic, particularly in the wake of Floyd’s death. In a New York Times op-ed from June 2020, Alexander attributes police violence to the same cycles of historical oppression she describes in The New Jim Crow. She writes:

We cannot solve a problem we do not understand. Donald Trump would not be the president and George Floyd would not be dead if, after the Civil War, our nation had committed itself to reparations, reconciliation and atonement for the land and people that colonizers stole, sold and plundered. (Alexander, Michelle. “America, This Is Your Chance.” The New York Times. 8 Jun. 2020.)

This view is consistent with Alexander’s broader argument in The New Jim Crow that systems of racial oppression persist when America fails to reckon with its racial legacy, particularly at moments of cultural transformation and transition like Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, and the protests in 2020. If history is any guide, Alexander argues, dismantling systems of racial oppression will merely set the stage for a new system to emerge unless this reckoning takes place. Look no further than the fact that police brutality against people of color persists, despite bipartisan calls to downsize prisons and other examples of progress in the fight to end mass incarceration.

While mass incarceration continues—albeit in a somewhat altered form that increasingly targets Latinx immigrants through detention and deportation—there is one cultural shift over the past 10 years that Alexander welcomes, even though it came at a great cost: the end of colorblindness. Throughout the book, Alexander implicates the myth of colorblindness in perpetuating racial indifference among whites toward the wildly disproportionate racial outcomes of mass incarceration. Moreover, the custom of eliminating overtly racist rhetoric from political speech had the effect of granting cover to white Americans who supported policies that created and maintained a racial undercaste. In the era of Trump, however, this cover is harder for white Americans to maintain. Alexander writes, “Today, racial bigotry, fear mongering, and scapegoating are no longer subterranean in our political discourse; the dog whistles have been replaced by bullhorns” (xiv).

It may seem strange to welcome such rhetoric in any form. Yet the re-emergence of racialized political speech not seen in the mainstream since the days of George Wallace has not only galvanized anti-racist Americans; it’s also made it more likely that criminal justice reform movements will acknowledge race as a factor, thus minimizing the chance that a new racial caste system will emerge. Alexander writes, “Trump’s blatant racial demagoguery has awakened many from their colorblind slumber and spurred collective action” (xlii).

Given that the American prison population has been declining since its peak in 2008, it is valid to wonder whether the broader message of The New Jim Crow is as urgent today as it was at the time of the book’s publication. Other noteworthy examples of progress include President Obama’s decision to grant clemency to nearly 2,000 people, many of whom were convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. Also of note is the First Step Act signed in 2018 by President Trump, which grants judges greater flexibility around mandatory minimum sentences and expands re-entry programs for the formerly incarcerated. It seems almost inconceivable that a president from either major party would have signed such an act in the 1980s or 190s.

Despite these modest improvements to the criminal justice system, 2.2 million people remain incarcerated in US prisons, a decrease of only 100,000 people since the incarceration population peaked at 2.3 million in 2008, according to the Pew Research Center. The statistics look somewhat brighter when measured as the number of incarcerated Americans per 100,000 US adults, which is down to 860 from 1,000. (Gramlich, John. “U.S. Incarceration Rate at a Two-Decade Low.” Pew Research Center. 2 May 2018.) Yet as Alexander repeatedly points out, the problems of mass incarceration persist long after an individual is released from prison. And according to the Prison Policy Initiative, the number of individuals under correctional control—meaning incarcerated, on parole, or on probation—is still 6.6 million, down from 7.3 million in 2010. Moreover, 19 million Americans have been convicted of a felony and therefore may face threats to their employment prospects, voting rights, and access to public benefits. (Sawyer, Wendy and Peter Wagner. “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020.” Prison Policy Initiative. 24 Mar. 2020.)

Finally, Alexander’s Introduction summarizes the book’s key thesis and puts forth its major themes. The author admits that upon first encountering the phrase, “THE DRUG WAR IS THE NEW JIM CROW” (4), she was skeptical. Yet once she began to view the War on Drugs and mass incarceration as startlingly effective tools of social and racial control, the similarities became impossible to ignore. This conclusion relies on a few important precepts, many of which she lays out here. One is that Reagan’s announcement of the War on Drugs came before drug use became a major issue for most Americans. Indeed, the spread of crack cocaine through urban communities of color was less the catalyst for the War on Drugs and more an ex post facto justification for it, coming years after Reagan embraced the “tough on crime” rhetoric of the Republican Party.

Another important precept underlying Alexander’s argument is the lack of an inverse correlation between crime and incarceration. In fact, there is far more evidence to suggest incarceration causes more crime, not less. In paraphrasing the research of top criminologists, Alexander writes, “Those who had meaningful economic and social opportunities were unlikely to commit crimes regardless of the penalty, while those who went to prison were far more likely to commit crimes again in the future” (9). Given what Alexander perceives to be the utter failure of mass incarceration as a system of crime prevention, she assumes that the true intent of the system is something more insidious, like racial subjugation.

A final and particularly damning piece of evidence supporting Alexander’s thesis is the simple observation that Black Americans do not use or sell drugs at higher rates than white Americans. The author is therefore right to question how it is possible, given similar rates of drug crime across white and Black Americans, that between 1983 and 2000, the incarceration rate for drug crimes committed by African Americans increased 26 times over, while the corresponding rate for whites only increased by a factor of eight. With all this mind, it is difficult for Alexander to reach any other conclusion than that the War on Drugs and mass incarceration are systems of racialized social control.