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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Hardcover – January 5, 2010

by Michelle Alexander (Author)
4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 16,050 ratings
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"Jarvious Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole."

As the United States celebrates the nation's "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life. Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status--much like their grandparents before them.

In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community--and all of us--to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.

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  1. Print length
    290 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    The New Press
  4. Publication date
    January 5, 2010
  5. Dimensions
    6.5 x 1 x 9.5 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1595581030
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1595581037
  8. See all details
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  1. Every system of injustice depends on the silence, paralysis, confusion, and cooperation of those it seeks to eliminate or control.
    Highlighted by 5,017 Kindle readers
  2. The system of mass incarceration is based on the prison label, not prison time.
    Highlighted by 4,548 Kindle readers
  3. Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Contrary to the rosy picture of race embodied in Barack Obama's political success and Oprah Winfrey's financial success, legal scholar Alexander argues vigorously and persuasively that [w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration as a system of social control (More African Americans are under correctional control today... than were enslaved in 1850). Alexander reviews American racial history from the colonies to the Clinton administration, delineating its transformation into the war on drugs. She offers an acute analysis of the effect of this mass incarceration upon former inmates who will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives, denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Most provocatively, she reveals how both the move toward colorblindness and affirmative action may blur our vision of injustice: most Americans know and don't know the truth about mass incarceration—but her carefully researched, deeply engaging, and thoroughly readable book should change that. (Feb.)
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Review

“Explosive debut…alarming, provocative and convincing.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Michelle Alexander’s brave and bold new book paints a haunting picture in which dreary felon garb, post-prison joblessness, and loss of voting rights now do the stigmatizing work once done by colored-only water fountains and legally segregated schools. With dazzling candor, Alexander argues that we all pay the cost of the new Jim Crow.“
—Lani Guinier, professor at Harvard Law School and author of Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice and The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy

“For every century there is a crisis in our democracy, the response to which defines how future generations view those who were alive at the time. In the 18th century it was the transatlantic slave trade, in the 19th century it was slavery, in the 20th century it was Jim Crow. Today it is mass incarceration. Alexander's book offers a timely and original framework for understanding mass incarceration, its roots to Jim Crow, our modern caste system, and what must be done to eliminate it. This book is a call to action.”
—Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and CEO, NAACP

“With imprisonment now the principal instrument of our social policy directed toward poorly educated black men, Michelle Alexander argues convincingly that the huge racial disparity of punishment in America is not the mere result of neutral state action. She sees the rise of mass incarceration as opening up a new front in the historic struggle for racial justice. And, she’s right. If you care about justice in America, you need to read this book!”
—Glenn C. Loury, economist at Brown University and author of The Anatomy of Racial Inequality and Race, Incarceration and American Values

“After reading The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's stunning work of scholarship, one gains the terrible realization that, for people of color, the American criminal justice system resembles the Soviet Union's gulag---the latter punished ideas, the former punishes a condition.”
—David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer-prize winning historian at NYU and author of W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963

"We need to pay attention to Michelle Alexander's contention that mass imprisonment in the U.S. constitutes a racial caste system. Her analysis reflects the passion of an advocate and the intellect of a scholar."
—Marc Mauer, Executive Director, The Sentencing Project, author of Race to Incarcerate

“A powerful analysis of why and how mass incarceration is happening in America, The New Jim Crow should be required reading for anyone working for real change in the criminal justice system.”
—Ronald E. Hampton, Executive Director, National Black Police Association

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ The New Press; 1st edition (January 5, 2010)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 290 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1595581030
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1595581037
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.28 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1 x 9.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 16,050 ratings

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Michelle Alexander

Michelle Alexander

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A longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, Michelle Alexander won a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship and now holds a joint appointment at the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. Alexander served for several years as the director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, which spearheaded the national campaign against racial profiling. At the beginning of her career she served as a law clerk on the United States Supreme Court for Justice Harry Blackmun. She lives outside Columbus, Ohio.

Customer reviews

4.8 out of 5 stars
4.8 out of 5
16,050 global ratings
The New Face of American Racism
5 Stars
The New Face of American Racism
Jim Crow is an ugly blemish on the American nation and while much of the repressive practices of Jim Crow have been eliminated or at least sharply curtailed, there are still active, often covert and/or conniving ways to keep minority races in their place. These underhanded means of social control and oppression are the subject of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.So, what exactly is the new Jim Crow? It is a means to control, dehumanize, repress, and ultimately destroy the lives of minorities by finding ways to target them for breaking crimes and send them off to prison. The main weapon of control is the disastrous and immoral war on drugs and this book devotes most of its pages to examining this so- called war, showing how it was devised and implemented as a way to unfairly target blacks and other minorities.This book is well- articulated and researched and some of its statistics are shocking. As I read, I often thought that the some of the stats had to be typos- they were too extreme to be true. But a quick check of sources proves them accurate. The chances of getting arrested, going to prison, and spending the rest of your life labeled as a felon are multiple times higher if your skin happens to be dark. Even if exactly the same crime is committed, a white person has exponentially greater odds of getting off easy, sometimes even having all charges dropped or the crime reduced. The disparities among different groups of people prove that the war on drugs has nothing to do with gaining control of a substance and everything to do with targeting specific groups of people.I can remember back in the 1980’s when the war on drugs was picking up steam. I was a university student at the time and we used to debate the drug war and its true motives. We all agreed that the war had nothing to do with the actual drugs- no one, not even a politician, could be so stupid to think that a war could be won against a substance. We knew there was something else going on and now that decades of data are available, the true motives have been exposed. This book does an excellent job explaining how/why the war on drugs was invented and how its proponents have been generally successful at pulling it off and making it seem like a fair, ‘colorblind’ way to deal with criminal activity.America’s racist past isn’t really in the past, as much as we want to believe. We like to think that progress has been made and, in many ways, it has, but we are far away from a truly equal and fair society. The New Jim Crow is an excellent way to learn about the new tactics embraced by the racist crowd and a call to action for everyone who wants to work toward a fair and just society.
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Doug
5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely a must read for the entire nation.
Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2024
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I thought that I was pretty knowledgeable about the histories of segregation, harsh prison sentencing, the prison system in general and the topics in this book, but after reading I realized I didn’t know much at all. This book was so well written, so informative, honestly it changed my life and views of politics, even my opinions of certain leaders whose actions I was completely unaware of. I wish everyone would read this book. If everyone had the knowledge contained in this book, I think it would be a great step towards enacting some real change in our society. I would rate this more than 5 stars if it were an option.
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Lindsey Peterson
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Arguments
Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2011
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The New Jim Crow is a really well-reasoned argument about the racial prejudice inherent in the criminal justice system and how this bias allows mass incarceration and the war on drugs to function as an effective system of social control, maintaining blacks, and especially poor, black men as a racial underclass.

The author takes the current idea of a post-racial society and challenges all of the wisdom we now hold as true. She asserts that the ostensible 'colorblindness' of the criminal justice system really functions as anything but colorblind and cites various studies showing this with strong statistical evidence. The fact that the (mostly) black men affected can be said to have committed crimes is the basic reason we all feel justified in ignoring the racial prejudice in the system and its implementation. As Alexander says, "it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly as a justification for discrimination, exclusion and social contempt. So we don't. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color "criminals" and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind."

We treat criminals as less than citizens, legally denying them access to jobs, housing, assistance, education, and civil rights like jury duty and voting. It is perfectly acceptable to treat them as such because we tell ourselves that they had a choice in becoming criminals. They didn't have to commit the crime. This is a false argument. Someone doing something illegal doesn't mean that they cannot be treated unjustly or that the system can no longer fail to produce an equitable outcome for them. A criminal is no less likely to be a victim of racial prejudice than a model citizen.

"The temptation is to insist that black men "choose" to be criminals; the system does not make them criminals, at least not in the way that slavery made blacks slaves or Jim Crow made them second-class citizens. The myth of choice here is seductive, but it should be resisted. African Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs than whites, but they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for precisely the same conduct. In fact, studies suggest that white professionals may be the most likely of any group to have engaged in illegal drug activity in their lifetime, yet they are the least likely to be made criminals. The prevalence of illegal drug activity among all racial and ethnic groups creates a situation in which, due to limited law enforcement resources and political constraints, some people are made criminals while others are not. Black people have been made criminals by the War on Drugs to a degree that dwarfs its effect on other racial and ethnic groups, especially whites. And the process of making them criminals has produced racial stigma."

Additionally, our criminal justice system is now based mostly on the prosecution of drug-related offenses. The majority of felons behind bars are there for drugs - using, dealing, smuggling, trafficking, etc. The thing about the War on Drugs is that it is conducted in a manner that specifically targets low income black neighborhoods, rather than middle and high income white neighborhoods where the crimes are just as likely to happen, albeit in lower population density. "Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. If there are significant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color... In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men." In some major cities, "as many as 80 percent of young African American men" have done jail time and are now considered criminals and are subject to the post-incarceration sanctions that keep them as a permanent underclass.

Another interesting part of the War on Drugs, is that not all felons are ineligible for public assitance, often, just drug felons, which taken with the image of the 'welfare queen' can pretty well illustrate what we think of blacks, and that the entire operation is at the very least related to racial motives.

"What is key to America's understanding of class is the persistent belief-despite all evidence to the contrary-that anyone, with the proper discipline and drive, can move from a lower class to a higher class. We recognize that mobility may be difficult, but the key to our collective self-image is the assumption that mobility is always possible, so failure to move up reflects on one's character. By extension, the failure of a race or ethnic group to move up reflects very poorly on the group as a whole."

We convince ourselves that we are giving minorities enough of a chance to move up by barring explicit discrimination against them for reasons of color and by providing them with access to top schools through affirmative action, but this really does nothing to improve the station of the vast majority of minority citizens.

It is 'trickle-down theory of justice'. "Affirmative action, particularly when it is justified on the grounds of diversity rather than equity (or remedy), masks the severity of racial inequality in America, leading to greatly exaggerated claims of racial progress and overly optimistic assments of the future for African Americans." We see the exceptions doing well, people like Oprah and President Obama, and think that if black people can get there, they can get anywhere they want to, and they don't because they either don't want to be there or don't want to work hard enough to be there. We don't think about the way that the world is stacked against them to begin with. And the worst part is that almost everyone complicit in this doesn't even realize that they're complicit. You don't think about it because you don't see it or you think it doesn't affect you.

If you haven't committed a crime or had anyone close to you commit a crime, you don't see the racial disparities in sentencing, plea bargaining, access to representation, access to a jury trial, etc. There are disparities all the way down. White defendants are more likely to be allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor offense. They're more likely to have privately engaged counsel rather than an overworked public defender. And they're less likely to be sentenced to life in prison than blacks. One of the strongest arguments for racial bias in sentencing comes from the Baldus study, which found that

"defendants charged with killing white victims received the death penalty eleven times more often than defendants charged with killing black victims. Georgia prosecutors... sought the death penalty in 70 percent of cases involving black defendants and white victims, but only 19 percent of cases involving white defendants and black victims... after accounting for thirty-five nonracial variables, the researchers found that defendants charged with killing white victims were 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than defendants charged with killing blacks."

The arguments in this book clearly have carried me, and I feel I've gained a lot by reading it. I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning a bit more about racial justice, even if they don't share my opinion. They can see the studies she references and judge the sources for themselves.
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jdesenso
5.0 out of 5 stars An extraordinary gut-check with a touch of teleology
Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2013
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Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow is a jarring, intricate look into one of the most urgent human rights crises of our time: mass incarceration. A former American Civil Liberties Union attorney and current professor of law at Ohio State University, Alexander takes on the role of scholar-insurgent in The New Jim Crow and argues for nothing less than a full interrogation of what she sees as the most "damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement" (11). This "backlash," according to Alexander--generally understood in civil rights history common sense as the rise of a New Right--is much more insidious, racist, and systematic than previously thought. Mass incarceration, she argues, is a "tightly networked system of laws, policies, [and] institutions" that looks eerily similar to life under Jim Crow and even slavery (13). Those caught in the crosshairs of this system of (racial) social control suffer life-long, legal discrimination in housing, welfare, suffrage, employment, and health care--all of which lead to a "closed circuit of perpetual marginality" (181).

Such marginality has several causes, yet she sees colorblind racial indifference and the War on Drugs as the two biggest culprits in the creation of yet another permanent racial under-caste. To make her case, Alexander pounds readers with facts, statistics, and Supreme Court rulings--the fact that "as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records" as one of many gut-checks (7). In short, Alexander's The New Jim Crow lays bare the troubling, racist realities of the American criminal justice system. And yet, maybe due to the severity of her topic, Alexander makes occasional leaps in logic, oversimplifies at times, and even lets the pathos of the subject matter cloud her conclusions. Nevertheless, her arguments are mostly sound and ultimately make the case for a desperately needed shift in public discourse and civil rights advocacy to address the "human rights nightmare" that is mass incarceration (15).

One of the most convincing parts of The New Jim Crow is the chapter entitled "The Lockdown." With powerful detail, Alexander takes readers step-by-step along the criminal justice chain to expose how the racist War on Drugs is waged. What she calls the "Rules of the Game," Alexander convincingly argues that the War on Drugs depends upon the erosion of Fourth Amendment rights--rights that protect privacy of person and property. Alexander threads the Supreme Court decisions of California v. Acevedo, Terry v. Ohio, and Florida v. Bostick to show that police tactics such as stop-and-frisk are protected by Supreme Court rulings. This point is not to be taken lightly, for it leads readers to understand that the state is absolutely complicit in both freeing police to round up whomever they want as well as tie the hands of citizens seeking legal recourse against discriminatory policing. This dynamic of racist state-based control, Alexander reveals, gets worse and worse as those arrested are hamstrung by unchecked prosecutorial powers, grossly inadequate public representation, mandatory minimum sentences, and perpetual "correctional supervision" if labeled felons (92). Readers are left wondering how such injustice can go on in a supposedly democratic society. Alexander is at her best here, implicating the entire institution of American justice in fewer than 50 pages.

Alexander's arguments in parts of other chapters, however, lack precision and evidence. In Chapter 4, Alexander writes: "If we actually learned to show love...and concern across racial lines during the Civil Rights Movement--rather than go colorblind--mass incarceration would not exist today" (172). Although a belief in cross-racial "love" and solidarity seems like it would remedy racial inequalities and, in a clear reach, mass incarceration, Alexander's argument is regrettably naïve here. For one, as she demonstrates pages earlier in the same chapter, civil rights leaders and everyday folk acknowledging race or "blackness" is not something that can be easily remedied with simple effort or even love. Rather, unconscious and conscious racism is difficult to out and defeat--with the 1995 study in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education in Chapter 3 as one of her many examples (107). While it is helpful to recognize that racism works at the unconscious level, it's unfair to argue that such "pre-thought" racism will go away with simple love and concern. Mass incarceration, without question, is part and parcel of a larger history of black criminalization and the racist political economy that is the US criminal justice system. In the above quote, it seems like Alexander is lost in the pathos of her subject and ignores her very own arguments from pages earlier.

What is also problematic is Alexander's assumption that love "across racial lines" was absent during the Civil Rights Movement. Aside from the fact that she provides no evidence, one can simply study the history of the civil rights movement in North Carolina or Milwaukee and discover that cross-racial concern was absolutely occurring during the civil rights movement. Now how we define "love" and "concern" may be up for debate, but to categorically frame the civil rights movement--and all conscious sympathizers--as lacking in concern and love just doesn't hold water. It would have been much more productive for Alexander to take the civil rights movement as well as racial justice champions to task with convincing evidence. She does this to some degree in her later chapters, but her "no concern" claim unfairly lays mass incarceration at the feet of civil rights thinkers.

If Alexander's purpose is to "stimulate a conversation" and get people thinking and talking about mass incarceration, she has accomplished her goal (15). Over the past two years, in fact, Alexander has appeared on National Public Radio, Democracy Now, and C-SPAN, as well as been invited to give talks in churches, universities, bookstores, and other spaces around the country. In light of her critical embrace of the Civil Rights Movement and the apparent rise of her The New Jim Crow as perhaps a galvanizing force for justice, the popularity of her book begs a few questions: Is The New Jim Crow and similar works that centralize injustice the new frontier for a contemporary Civil Rights Movement? And is The New Jim Crow evidence enough that the Civil Rights Movement has never ended, but only recast in the realm of ideas? Alexander, of course, would argue that a movement must be more than ideas; it must also be built on love, human and racial recognition, and the full embrace of difference. For Alexander, nothing less will do. However, as she argues in her "Introduction," racialized systems of control are "inevitable"--almost as if mass incarceration is destined to be reborn (15). Though Alexander gives ways to prevent this rebirth, such teleology, though present throughout her book, is never reconciled. In the end, we are left with a conflicted, uneasy sense of hope as the racial control telos haunts readers even after the book has been shelved.
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17 B-Ball Junkie
5.0 out of 5 stars Every American needs to read this!!!!
Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2024
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Initially it was tough for me to read more than two pages. The book really breaks down the policies of discrimination and how they’ve come to be in America. It took me a while but eventually reading this became easier. The insight provided in these pages cannot be matched. Every American citizen needs to read this book. It will force you to understand how our society truly works.

As tough as some of the information is to process, we all need to be aware of it.

Powerful!!!
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Sonia.
4.0 out of 5 stars Bien
Reviewed in Spain on August 8, 2019
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Client d'Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars Très très instructif
Reviewed in France on January 26, 2019
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Livre vraiment instructif. Si le sujet vous intéresse, vous ne serez pas déçu !
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fff
5.0 out of 5 stars Lesenswert
Reviewed in Germany on July 27, 2017
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Ich habe dieses Buch für eine Studienarbeit bestellt. Es erklärt die unter dem Deckmantel "colorblindness" herrschende Rassendiskriminierung in den USA.
Absolut lesenswert!
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Everyone should read this
Reviewed in Australia on November 5, 2020
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A comprehensive outline of how racism and discrimination has been perpetuated through the American Legal system - this book gives you into how the USA is where it is today. It's particularly salient in the wake of George Floyd and other victims of this system
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5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in India on December 20, 2016
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Probably the best book in modern times about civil rights issues and crony capitalism
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