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

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a nonfiction book published in 2010 by American author and legal scholar Michelle Alexander. The book argues that the War on Drugs and mass incarceration operate as tools of racialized social control and oppression, not unlike the system in place during the Jim Crow era in the American South. The winner of the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction, The New Jim Crow continues to appear on countless racial justice reading lists and was named one of the most influential books of the past 20 years by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

This study guide refers to the 10th-anniversary edition published in 2020 by the New Press.

Content Warning: The source material and this guide contain instances and discussions of racism, police brutality, slavery, and drug abuse.

Between the 1870s and 1960s, legal segregation, racially targeted voting laws, and a host of other political, legal, and cultural forces effectively transformed Black men and women living in the American South into second-class citizens—or, as Alexander puts it, members of a “racial undercaste” (129). This period of American history is known as the Jim Crow era. While civil rights legislation in the 1960s eliminated this specific form of oppression and disenfranchisement, a new form of racialized social control emerged in the 1980s: mass incarceration. With the launch of the War on Drugs and a series of draconian crime bills, the number of incarcerated Americans skyrocketed in less than three decades from 300,000 to over 2 million, most of them for drug convictions and most of them Black men. This transpired even though white and Black Americans sell and use drugs at roughly the same rates. Far from being an effective system of crime deterrence, Alexander argues that mass incarceration increases violent crime. Given that the United States declared the War on Drugs before Americans even perceived drug use to be a serious problem, this leads Alexander to conclude that mass incarceration was designed as a system of racial control rather than an effort to combat violent crime.

In Chapter 1 Alexander details the history of “racialized social control” (20). From slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration, she identifies a persistent pattern by which systems of racial subjugation are built, maintained, dismantled, and finally transformed to fit the circumstances of a given era. In the case of mass incarceration, politicians like Ronald Reagan built the system to fit into a new post-Civil Rights Movement paradigm that prohibited politicians from making overtly racist appeals to American voters. In this new era of supposed colorblindness, Reagan—and later George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton—utilized “law and order” (50) rhetoric that implicitly demonized Black men as predators. In the middle of Reagan’s presidency, crack cocaine swept through urban communities of color, giving “tough on crime” advocates the perfect pretext to launch an aggressive drug enforcement campaign against Black American males.

In Chapter 2 Alexander explains exactly how the new racial caste system works, beginning with its point of entry: the police. Empowered by Supreme Court decisions that effectively gutted the Fourth Amendment, police officers may stop and search individuals under the faintest pretexts of probable cause. Yet just because police departments can target millions of Americans suspected of possessing small amounts of drugs, the question remains of why they choose to divert time and resources away from addressing more serious crimes like murders and rapes. Alexander points to huge financial incentives offered by the federal government to encourage widespread enforcement of minor drug infractions. Massive federal cash grants and changes to civil asset forfeiture laws have made participation in the drug war extraordinarily lucrative for state and local police departments.

In the following chapter Alexander explores why, in many states, Black Americans make up as much as 80% to 90% of individuals who serve time in prison on drug charges, even though the system is formally colorblind and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates. Unlike in the case of robberies or assaults, where clear victims exist, those involved with drug transactions are unlikely to report them to the police because doing so would implicate themselves in a crime. As a result, police must be proactive in addressing drug crime and are therefore afforded an enormous amount of discretion concerning whom to target. As for why police departments choose to disproportionately target people of color, Alexander blames both implicit biases and pervasive media and political campaigns that frame Black men as criminals in the American imagination. Prosecutors are also granted an outsized amount of discretion thanks to the introduction of mandatory minimum sentences for drug criminals. With such harsh sentences hanging over the heads of those charged with drug crimes, prosecutors are better empowered to extract plea deals. While these plea deals may keep an individual out of jail, they also frequently result in a felony record, saddling that person for life with what Alexander calls “the prison label” (189).

The consequences of this prison label are the focus of Chapter 4. When an individual leaves prison or accepts a felony plea deal, they face legal discrimination in employment, housing, welfare benefits, and often voting rights. It is here that Alexander observes the strongest similarities between mass incarceration and the Jim Crow era, given that Black Americans faced these same forms of discrimination during the first half of the 20th century in the South. She also addresses the stigma felt by everyone touched by the criminal justice system, which includes the formerly incarcerated, their families, and any individual who can expect daily harassment from police officers.

The following chapter outlines the specific similarities and differences between Jim Crow and mass incarceration. Aside from the legal discrimination in both systems, Jim Crow and mass incarceration have similar political roots. Both systems gained political support from elites who sought to exploit the economic and cultural fears of poor and working-class whites. Both operate by defining what it means to be Black in America in the cultural imagination—in the case of mass incarceration, that means defining Black men as criminals. Perhaps the most significant and frightening difference is that while both slavery and Jim Crow were systems of labor exploitation, mass incarceration involves marginalization and removal from society. Alexander points out that similar racially based marginalization efforts were precursors to genocides in the 20th century.

The final chapter attempts to chart a way forward for civil rights lawyers, activists, and community members. Alexander maintains that it is crucial for any reform movement to acknowledge the role played by race in mass incarceration. Otherwise, she argues, another racial caste system will emerge to replace it, just as mass incarceration replaced Jim Crow, and Jim Crow replaced slavery.