The Criminal Caste

I began working in the California prison system in 2008, the year Barack Obama won his first election. In the prison, the response to the news of his victory was quiet. About two‐thirds of the men in the outpatient program where I work are African‐American, and about as many have spent or will spend much of their adult lives locked up, many of them serving terms of twenty‐five years to life for nonviolent crimes. Asked how they felt about the election, inmates in the program answered that it didn’t matter. The response wasn’t skeptical — it was bitter. Now, in Obama’s second term, their attitudes toward Obama continue to be ambivalent: they express a clear sense of the irony of their position at the present historical moment — a moment in which the laws of this country continue to deny equal protection to a large segment of its minority population.

Readers of The New Jim Crow may be familiar with some of the facts about imprisonment in the United States. In California, where prison overcrowding has officially been recognized as constituting a human rights crisis, voters approved a measure reforming the state’s three‐strikes law in November 2012. Other states’ biased law enforcement practices, for example those authorized under New York City’s stop‐and‐frisk program, have recently come under closer scrutiny. The fact remains that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world — a rate six to ten times greater than other industrialized nations — although our crime rates fall below the international average. No other country in the world imprisons its racial or ethnic minorities so disproportionately.

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander — a professor at Ohio State University and former director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Northern California — takes the rise of incarceration over the last thirty years as her starting point, and discusses the increase in numbers, as well as the disparity in rates of incarceration between races, as a direct consequence of the “war on drugs.” She asks, in effect, how we can account for this war without a concurrent rise in drug crime, and how we are to explain its dramatic racial disparities, which have been shown to be unrelated to the rates of using and selling among blacks and whites.

The Criminalization of Black Men

Alexander’s book addresses the known facts about mass incarceration — and also a more basic, if less recognized, prison problem, a different kind of life sentence being served by millions of Americans. This is the story not only of the locking up of a huge part of this country’s population, but also, in Alexander’s phrase, of its “locking out.” By this she means the closing of our justice system to every individual who has at one time or another entered a prison: how the justice system strips members of this group of their basic rights, resources, and protections, and brands them permanently as members of a criminal caste.

In the early chapters of the book, Alexander traces the criminalization of young black men that began in the 1950s to the dissolution of the Jim Crow laws — the state and local laws enacted between 1876 and 1965 that enforced racial segregation throughout the South. Opposition to the broad changes of the Civil Rights Era, she demonstrates, went hand‐in‐hand with the design of new crime legislation. A new law‐and‐order rhetoric replaced the more explicitly racial terms of the older caste system. One hundred years earlier, the creation of Jim Crow laws had helped consolidate poor and working‐class white opposition to the end of slavery; now, with the end of Jim Crow, the leaders of a conservative New Majority sought a new way of realigning white voters. Alexander’s account of the evolution of America’s caste system, starting with slavery, through Jim Crow and to our present‐day aspiration to colorblindness, reveals a series of such parallels.

The historic parallels she draws to Jim Crow are...