Title: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colordlindness

Author: Michelle Alexander

Year of Publication: 2012

Thesis:

Charts the changes, not in substance, but in rhetoric, that have contributed to the continuance of racialized slavery under a different name: mass incarceration. Race-neutral language hides the inequities in our criminal justice system and the emergence/continuance of a racial caste system in the U.S. Advocates moving to a humanistic model - end war on drugs - move to public health model; legalize drugs; eliminate stigma. Requires a society wide social movement.

Time: Slavery to present (especially histories of the erosion of various amendments).

Geography: U.S.

Organization:

Intro
About the Author
Foreword by Cornel West
Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction

- Describes Dr. Alexander's development from legal concentration on civil rights and moving to criminal justice, alongside an awakening about the true system (of Jim Crow) at work. Notes the impact of the manufactured drug war.

1 The Rebirth of Caste
- CRM, Reagan's drug war
2 The Lockdown
- Erosion of amendments (4,14,15)
3 The Color of Justice
- Building racial disparities in policing, etc.
4 The Cruel Hand
- Post-prison issues - loss of employment, housing, benefits, any potential for survival for people labeled "felon."
5 The New Jim Crow
- Connects myth of the "absentee Black father" to mass incarceration.
6 The Fire This Time
- Call for grassroots movement (see in thesis)
Notes
Index

Type: Legal/Social

Methods:

Sources:

Court cases, newspapers, government publications (especially on drugs and crime), Human Rights Watch publications, secondary works in sociology, criminology, psychology, and history (books and articles), independent reports (Pew, American Bar Association, ACLU, etc.),

Historiography:

Keywords: mass incarceration, Jim Crow

Themes:

Mass incarceration, asset forfeiture (doesn't require culpability), SC requires admission of racism (stats not admissable), "recidivism" (thinking about this - reconsider the barriers to survival/success outside)

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

The politics of responsibility:
“The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.” (215)

The purpose/nature of criminal justice:
“The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.” (188)

How we define "racism":
“When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and "whites only" signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, goodhearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners--and wished them well--nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation... Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system.” (183)

The meaning of Blackness (now tied to criminality, not slavery):
“Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and 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. That is what it means to be black.” (197)

On the fallacy of a "post-racial" framework:
“Black success stories lend credence to the notion that anyone, no matter how poor or how black you may be, can make it to the top, if only you try hard enough. These stories “prove” that race is no longer relevant. Whereas black success stories undermined the logic of Jim Crow, they actually reinforce the system of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration depends for its legitimacy on the widespread belief that all those who appear trapped at the bottom actually chose their fate.” (248)

On the meaning of King's statement, re: color:
“Martin Luther King Jr. called for us to be lovestruck with each other, not colorblind toward each other. To be lovestruck is to care, to have deep compassion, and to be concerned for each and every individual, including the poor and vulnerable.” (x - from Cornel West's foreword)

On the Politics of Respectability:
“Parents and schoolteachers counsel black children that, if they ever hope to escape this system and avoid prison time, they must be on their best behavior, raise their arms and spread their legs for the police without complaint, stay in failing schools, pull up their pants, and refuse all forms of illegal work and moneymaking activity, even if jobs in the legal economy are impossible to find. Girls are told not to have children until they are married to a "good" black man who can help provide for a family with a legal job. They are told to wait and wait for Mr. Right even if that means, in a jobless ghetto, never having children at all.” (215)

Notes:
"In my experience, people who have been incarcerated rarely have difficulty identifying the parallels between these systems of social control." (4) - This reminds me of a statement one of my mentors made long ago - something like, 'It's not those in control who will liberate anyone; rather, they will be liberated by those dispossessed.' It extends further to the idea that somehow in the Marxist sense, the dispossessed only have a mere notion of how they are being oppressed. This I'm curious about.

When I first read this book, I read it from "cover to cover," so to speak, leading up to and as I was on my way to an interview with my advisor, Dr. Leslie Alexander in Columbus, Ohio. I had read one of her books, and in an effort to make sure I was not totally unaware of what was going in the world, finished it just as I pulled up to our meeting. This has nothing to do with studying for comps, but I do remember posting quotes from it on Facebook and getting into at least one argument with an acquaintance of mine about it.

Talk at UO - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH0EcN-Sln0

Something I missed before was how the "southern strategy" was responsible for pushing poor whites to the Republican party. Democrats go further right to recapture folks based on incarceration.

Drug war declared prior to the advent of crack cocaine, etc. (as in, nobody thought it was an issue). Interestingly, Iran-Contra/flooding of predominantly Black neighborhoods happens during Reagan's presidency.

Placement of prisons in largely white, rural areas creates economic dependency & ideology that reinforces these biases.

See review by Terrence Tucker for a decent chapter summary; review by David Stein for critiques on looking more broadly at labor history & connection between movements and incarceration. Most thorough attention seems to come from Frank Butler.

It seems like the association of criminality with blackness would have started even before the Civil War. Something I need to look more closely at.