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

Term Paper November 29, 2011 1050 words

Maggie Smith University of Michigan

Book Review

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

Introduction The book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the era of color-blindness of the skin provides an unflinching look at Americas addiction to incarceration and presents an alarming diagnosis: Corporate greed, political opportunism and exploitation of hatred and fear ancestors have been consolidated to create the monster explosion of prison industrial complex, the worlds largest. Furthermore, the author Michelle Alexander, a professor at Moritz College of Law at the University of Ohio, made a very deep investigation in U.S. history, and even deeper criminal law and practice. She concludes that the brutal repression and control system commonly known as Jim Crow, has re-emerged in our times. Thats why it is named the new Jim Crow 1.

Body The Authors Definitions The authors message is plain and poignant: mass incarceration is the new racial caste system of the twenty-first century, built on colorblindnesss dual weapons of systemic racism and willful ambivalence, and racial caste must be finally confronted and dismantled in the United States once and for all. Her ambitious vision is well-outlined in The New Jim Crow, a selfdescribed call to action, which meticulously details the history and law of mass incarceration, namely through the War on Drugs.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, By Michelle Alexander. The New Press, New York, N.Y., 2010, 1-290

Book Review

In his book, the author states that during the period of Reconstruction (1865-1877) Federal government gave the civil rights of blacks. Since coming to power of Democrats in the 1870s, began limiting voting rights for blacks. Center of intolerance to blacks was Louisiana. In 1877, attempts to reach a compromise led to the federal troops were removed from the south. White Democrats returned to its authority. In the 1880s several blacks were still working in local authorities, but the Democrats have made laws, imposing more restrictions on voting for blacks. This system of legal discrimination indeed appeared in the same way as the first 2. The Adequacy of Data/Evidence Michelle Alexander makes clear that her book is written for racial justice advocates who need to care more about mass incarceration. She acknowledged that she had always been acutely aware of racial injustice, as a child of an inter-racial marriage between a white mother and black father. Alexander observed, elaborating that her parents faced rental discrimination, and other mistreatments which her mother had not experienced before. Their hardships occurred in the backdrop of a landmark Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, which ruled bans against interracial marriage as unconstitutional. Alexander was born within months of Loving, and she developed sensitivity to issues of race in America from an early age. During college, Alexander volunteered at a newly de-segregated high school attended by poor Black children. Her experience at the schools, along with another volunteer experience during college at a womens prison, impressed the meaning of systemic racism onto her political awareness. It was during this time that she learned that race served to mark certain people as second-class citizens in the present, even if less overtly.

Frost, N. A. and Clear, T. R., Understanding mass incarceration as a grand social experiment, in Austin Sarat (ed.) Special Issue New Perspectives on Crime and Criminal Justice (Studies in Law, Politics and Society, Volume 47), (2009) pp.159-191

Book Review

The Logic or Cogency of the Claims In fact, the current system of legal discrimination was born more or less the same way as the first. After the crushing defeat of the South in the Civil War, millions of newly freed Africans exercised their new rights during the period of Reconstruction. Black men became senators and deputies throughout the South. But this period was short, and as soon as possible, states passed harsh laws known as the Black Codes, which denied black people their rights, criminalizing their behavior and left vulnerable to the suppression of the prisons in the South, where convicts were leased from third parties such as labor: This was the revival of slavery by other means. Alexander concludes that the new system - this new fusion of political and economic interests - appointed Blacks, especially those involved in the drug industry, such as human capital for the massive construction of prisons, large staff of employees, and other appendages of the apparatus of state repression 3. But perhaps most notable Alexander study is its conclusion that the U.S. black population is a "racial caste" that nourishes and perpetuates the mass incarceration. It could be argued that such a claim seems untenable when we see a black president, hundreds of black politicians and many black people in entertainment and sports. But Dr. Alexander explains that any system allows for exceptions, because they serve to legitimize the system and, in this case, to conceal its ugliness and its widespread effects on the majority of blacks. The Degree to Which the Authors Perspective Reflects a Sociological Imagination The New Jim Crow goes a long way to explain these contradictions within the colorblind

Hovde, P., The political analysis of mass incarceration, in Austin Sarat (ed.) 53 (Studies in Law, Politics and Society, Volume 53), (2010)pp.111-135

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and mass incarceration phenomena. The books first chapter, The Rebirth of Caste, explains that the law and order rhetoric strategically deployed in the 1960s to quell the Civil Rights Movement ripened into justification for the Black drug crackdown of the 1980s. The promise or peril of American racial justice may hang by a thread of shared compassion, a message pushed by then-candidate Barack Obama in his well-known Philadelphia address. Alexander takes a sobered view of President Barack Obamas racial agenda, but hopes to remind communities of color that they cannot expect anything more from the President, who operates in a precarious, colorblind political landscape. If anything, she urges, we need to be more willing to engage around aggressive advocacy and organizing and to rouse America from its colorblind dream. She writes in the final chapter, The Fire This Time, that Martin Luther King Jr.s dream had evolved in the Poor Peoples Movement into a recognition that the time had come for racial justice advocates to shift from a civil rights to human rights paradigm, and that the real work of movement building had just begun.4 Where Alexanders analysis excels is in its unveiling of the evisceration of presumed Constitutional protections that have occurred as a consequence of the drug war defendants powerlessness in the face of aggressive and discretionary police practices, an insufficient and inadequate criminal defense bar, and court decisions that allow racial profiling to continue, although race is legally a suspect (protected) category. Thus, despite the 4th Amendment, police routinely stop and frisk young male suspects; in New York City in 2006, there were nearly 1400 of these every day. What Alexander labels collateral consequences of having a prison record contributes to her conclusion that millions are relegated to a second-class or caste assignation.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, By Michelle Alexander. The New Press, New York, N.Y., 2010, 1-290

Book Review

Conclusion The book, The New Jim Crow offers a strong vision of Americas addiction to put people in jail, and gives an alarming diagnosis: the American corporate greed, political opportunism and exploitation of old hatred and fears have come together to create the monster explosion of prison industrial complex, the worlds largest. Furthermore, the author, Michelle Alexander, professor Moritz College of Law, the Ohio State University, OSU, also investigates the history of the United States, and even more deeply the U.S. practice of criminal law, and concludes that the brutal repression and control system commonly known as Jim Crow, has been resurrected at this time. That is why Dr. Alexander calls his book, The New Jim Crow.

Book Review

Bibliography

James, A. and Irwin, J. A Blueprint for Reducing Crime and incarceration in the United States. 2006. Pp 23-43 Frost, N. A. and Clear, T. R., Understanding mass incarceration as a grand social experiment, in Austin Sarat (ed.) Special Issue New Perspectives on Crime and Criminal Justice (Studies in Law, Politics and Society, Volume 47), (2009) pp.159-191 Hovde, P., The political analysis of mass incarceration, in Austin Sarat (ed.) 53 (Studies in Law, Politics and Society, Volume 53), (2010)pp.111-135 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, By Michelle Alexander. The New Press, New York, N.Y., 2010, 1-290