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

An important book about the mistreatment of people of color (especially black men) in the United States by the US legal systmem, especially in regards to the War on Drugs. Plenty of history, statistics and stories abound regarding how people of color bear the brunt of the negative effects of the war on drugs.

From prison labor, cash bail, legal enforcement, jail conditions and more, black men suffer the most from the war on drugs.

I gave this book four stars because while it was very well researched and excellently written, I felt that Alexander fell short in her argumentation and exegesis. It was frustrating, especially in the later chapters, to recognize that she either felt the need to downplay the horrors of the US prison system for the sake of appeal, or she simply can't bring herself to believe how bad it is.

This was most notable in the way she gave indecisive remarks about the motivation behind why mass incarceration is how it is. She remarks that slavery was exploitative while modern mass incarceration merely marginalizes and treats African Americans as if they have no worth. Then later on she barely glosses over the capitalistic nature of prison labor and how forced labor and the prison industry as a whole is just that, an industry.

Another point of contention I had with the book was Alexander's rather Christian relationship with condemning crime. While she fully supports with hard data that black people are just as likely to use illicit drugs as whites, that they are often falsely accused with no real support to fair legal representation or judgment, have harsher sentences, and are screwed over by a system that would make illegal trades tempting, she goes on to distance herself from defending crime itself or in any way siding with criminals. This feels very two-faced and not a strong enough advocacy for those who lose their entire livelihoods to the system she's describing. She even says "love the criminal, hate the crime," and insists on using language that still condemns felons, though in the same paragraphs admitting that as a society we're expected to do just that - condemn and hate felons for being felons. Therefore it seems at best rueful tone when she says, “In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer permissible to hate blacks, but we can hate criminals.”

That said, one of her most powerful arguments is that of how mass incarceration impacts our voting systems and demographics in this country. She writes, “One reason so many people have a false impression of the economic wellbeing of African Americans, as a group, is that poverty and unemployment statistics do not include people who are behind bars.” Earlier she also notes that “Because most new prison construction occurs in predominantly white, rural areas, white communities benefit from inflated population totals at the expense of urban, overwhelmingly minority communities from which the prisoners come. This has enormous consequences for the redistricting process. White rural communities that house prisons wind up with more people in state legislatures representing them, while poor communities of color lose representatives because it appears their population has declined. This policy is disturbingly reminiscent of the three-fifths clause in the original Constitution, which enhanced the political clout of slaveholding states by including 60 percent of slaves in the population base for calculating Congressional seats and electoral votes, even though they could not vote.”

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to inform themselves about the systemic injustice and racism of the American system, from prison to litigation to courts to ghettos. It gets four stars from me because after reading it, I wished it had lived up to its reputation in being challenging in how radical it is. Instead it only made me recognize that we still have so far to go if this book is the one being hailed as the #1 must-read on the subject.

Nice introduction to caste in America.

An important book that everyone should read. It's not easy facing the realities of our current class and race-baced systems but I would rather be armed with the truth than blissfully ignorant to it.

An abridged version of this book should be required reading for every high school kid in the United States.

It makes national news and we all get irate when a U.S. citizen goes to a foreign country, breaks the law, and ends up with an out of proportion punishment including things like beatings or solitary confinement. In our own country, our white kids get send to rehab for getting caught with pot, and our black kids get sent to jail, where they can end up getting beat by the guards and put in solitary confinement. That was the life of Kalief Browder, who spent 3 years in Rikers despite never having had a trial, finally being released when charges were dropped, only to commit suicide because he could never recover from the treatment he'd had as a child in prison. Why couldn't we get just as upset about his mistreatment as we could about Otto Warmbier, who knew he was doing something stupid and criminal in a totalitarian dictatorship.

Read this book and you will know why we need to break the mold and get rid of the completely racist, profit-driven system we have.