Monday, October 25, 2010

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

If you're under the age of, say, 40 or 50, you have no first-hand memory of Jim Crow.  I know I don't.  Most of my life has been in what Michelle Alexander calls "the age of colorblindness."  There's plenty of racism in the world; I guess there always will be.  But our society is now officially colorblind.  We have seen black corporate leaders, sports and entertainment figures, professionals, teachers, police and fire personnel, elected officials, and, now, a U.S. president. Who can say our society has elements of racial control likened to Jim Crow?  Alexander makes a convincing case.

The bottom line is that the absurdly high percentage of African-American males who are in jail or have been convicted of felonies is not a result of that group's propensity for criminal activity but is a result of racist policies.  Just as slavery and Jim Crow excluded blacks from mainstream life, now mass incarceration, primarily as a result of the War on Drugs, has excluded them.  Even after they leave prison, ex-convicts try to reenter mainstream culture but are faced with restrictions on voting and running for office, exclusion by many trade associations and professional licensing, exclusion from public housing and other government benefits, rejection from many employers, and, of course, life-long social stigma.

The biggest culprit here is the War on Drugs.  Starting in the Reagan administration, law enforcement has vastly increased its focus on the enforcement of drug laws.  Ironically, at the time Reagan initiated the WoD, drug use was actually on the decline.  But, hey, we had to learn how to "Just say no."  The WoD introduced more and more incentives for law enforcement to arrest and prosecute drug users.  Besides federal monetary grants, local police were given access to military weaponry and tactics to use against their citizens.  SWAT raids against grandmas?  Check.  In addition, seizure rules gave police the ability to seize money, cars, houses, land, and anything else they deemed connected in any way to a drug crime.  Here's an idea: lets tie police department budgets and officers' salary bonuses to seized assets to give them an incentive to seize even more.  Done!

What does the WoD have to do with race?  Tons.  Where is it easier to find drug activity?  In a neighborhood where people live in crowded apartments and spend a lot of time outside, or in a neighborhood where people have large homes and fenced yards?  Who is more likely to have connections and money to get out of drug convictions, teenage children of suburban white professionals, or black high school kids in the inner city?  The fact is, white people use drugs at higher rates than black people, but arrests and convictions of black for drug crimes far outweigh those for whites.

Well, the drug laws themselves aren't racist--they're colorblind, like our enlightened society!  Wrong.  First, the easy one: sentencing for crack cocaine is 100 times harsher than for powder cocaine.  Even though whites use crack too, thanks to the Reagan-era anti-drug hysteria, crack is associated with blacks.  And laws are enforced and prosecuted with the discretion of police and prosecutors.  Alexander looks at data on traffic stops, pedestrian stops, and other "pretense" stops; blacks are stopped much more frequently for things like a burned out taillight as a pretense for a search, thus are found with drugs on random searches more frequently.  And to top it off, the courts have excluded the overwhelming evidence of racism from consideration.  So what if the vast majority of drug arrests are of black men; unless you have an officer on video screaming "I'm going to through your nigga a-- in jail" or some other blatantly racist rant, you have no case for racism.

Alexander presents a convincing case demonstrating the racism of our law enforcement system which has put the black man in a subservient position in society.  As a white man, it makes me furious to see the way society, which I tend to think of as pretty fair, treats blacks.  As the father of a black son, it makes me fear for his future.  There are times when Alexander seems to oversell the case, but she presents so much data that even her occasional emotional foray does not seem off the mark.  I will say that if I had heard Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton give a speech making these points, I would have written them off.  I can't stand those guys, con men and manipulators that they are.  But I can no longer ignore what they say as easily.

So what about those successful African-Americans?  Alexander says that's great to have these examples, but we should not forget the mass of black men, the millions stigmatized and excluded by the criminal justice system.  She acknowledges the difficulty in defending the civil rights of the criminal class, but we have to face the racism of the system.  She chastises the civil rights establishment for basically ignoring this issue.

I am with Alexander on the hypocrisy of the WoD.  Our past 3 presidents have acknowledged their experimentation with drugs.  If they had been held to the same standard as an inner-city black teenager, they each could probably have been convicted at some point, making them ineligible for public office.  But do any of them speak out in favor of easing drug criminalization?  Of course not.  (There's a time machine fantasy for you: I wish I could travel back in time to Obama's youth, arrest him during one of his drug trips, make sure he is convicted, maybe have him serve a little time, then our nation would never have to be afflicted with his poisonous policies!)

The New Jim Crow is a difficult book to read.  My blood was boiling at points.  If I were a younger man, I would be sending off applications to law school and applying for internships at some advocacy groups. If you've ever been skeptical of claims regarding racism in the criminal justice system, I challenge you to read this book.  If you ever thought the WoD was a good idea, read this book.  If you think it's a great idea to lock up such a large percentage of our population, read this book.  Alexander's right, a civil rights campaign calling for the defense of convicted drug users may not play as well as defending the rights of poor kids to have an equal education, but it is no less important.

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