In 2012, a Los Angeles Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence indicated former Los Angeles Sheriff Lee Baca was negligent and largely insulated by his staff from the problem of excessive use of force against inmates in county jails. Baca resigned in 2014. On May 17, 2017 he was sentenced to three years in federal prison for obstructing an FBI investigation of abuses in county jails.
Conditions in Los Angeles County jails mirror elements of mass incarceration that are prevalent throughout the nation. But have efforts in recent years to increase public awareness of the devastating depth of mass incarceration resulted in significant systemic change? The answer makes periodically re-visiting the issue all the more important.
Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness remains a penetrating analysis of mass incarceration. It asserts America’s prison industrial complex is the new Jim Crow which institutionalizes segregation as the nation’s proven method of control. It is also a framework for better understanding mass incarceration and its massive implications.
Alexander argues imprisonment, the principal method of social policy directed towards mostly poor, uneducated Black men, reflects race-based public policies that extend well beyond prison walls. Author David Levering Lewis: “The new Jim Crow sharpens the 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.” The New Jim Crow describes racialized imprisonment of Blacks, especially, an experience we are reluctant to challenge, but offers a perspective and analysis that hopefully, will open eyes and generate broader conversation about the onerous implications of mass incarceration.
Mass incarceration in the U.S. is a comprehensive and well-designed system of racialized social control. Alexander distinguishes between “dismantle” and “reform,” arguing the latter is essentially ineffective. The system operates through criminal justice institutions but functions more like a caste system than a system of crime control. The book is intended to stimulate conversation on the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetuating a racial hierarchy in the U.S.: “Caste” denotes a stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position. Racial caste systems do not require racial hostility or overt bigotry to thrive, they need only racial indifference.
The author insists the new Jim Crow can never be dismantled through traditional litigation and policy reform strategies that are wholly disconnected from a major social movement. But such a movement is impossible if those most committed to abolishing racial hierarchy continue to behave as if a state-sponsored racial caste system no longer exists.
In each generation, new tactics have been used for achieving the same goals shared by the Founding Fathers. Denying African Americans citizenship was deemed essential to the formation of the original Union and hundreds of years later America is still not an egalitarian democracy. Arguments and rationalizations abound in support of racial exclusion and discrimination; they have changed and evolved but the outcome is largely the same. An extraordinary percentage of Black men in the United States are barred from voting today, just as they have been through most of American history. They are also subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, education and public benefits. What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it.
In an era of so-called color-blindness, many believe it is no longer socially permissible to use race explicitly as a justification for discrimination, exclusion or social contempt. Rather, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then continue to engage in all of the practices we supposedly left behind. Today, it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you are labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination are suddenly legal. We have not ended racial caste in America, it has merely been redesigned.
Alexander recalls she reached the conclusions presented in the book reluctantly. Ten years prior, she would have argued strenuously against the book’s central claim, i.e., that something akin to a racial caste system currently exists in America. And, had Barack Obama been elected president then, she would have argued that his election marked the nation’s triumph over racial caste—“the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow.”
Later, as an experienced civil rights lawyer, she came to feel she was wrong about the criminal justice system. It was not just another institution infected with racial bias but, rather, “an entirely different beast.” No one imagined that the prison population would more than quintuple in their lifetime. And despite the unprecedented levels of incarceration in the Black (and Latino) community, Blacks themselves are typically quiet. One in three young Black men is under the control of the criminal justice system, in jail, on probation or parole, yet mass incarceration is categorized as a criminal justice issue, not a racial justice crisis.
The frightening implications of mass incarceration require a new social consensus about race and its role in defining the basic structure of American society if we ever hope to abolish the new Jim Crow. Blacks, who have always been prime victims of Jim Crow, should lead the vanguard that forges such a consensus.
