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

A devastating account of the US legal system doing its job perfectly well. The US government has replaced one caste system (Jim Crow) for another one (imprisonment, parole, detention) that keeps the majority of minorities in a permanent state of disenfranchisement. Michelle Alexander looks in detail at what economists usually miss, namely the entire legal structure of the courts, parole, probation and laws that effectively turn a perpetrator of a crime into a moral outlaw who is unworthy of rehabilitation.... Alexander does a fine job of truth-telling, pointing the finger where it rightly should be pointed: at all of us, liberal and conservative, white and black.”—Marion Wright Edelman.

Contrary to the rosy picture of race embodied in Barack Obama’s political success and Oprah Winfrey’s financial success, legal scholar Alexander argues that racial caste has not ended in the US; it has been merely redesigned. Jim Crow and legal racial segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration as a system of social control. More Americans of African descent are under correctional control today ... than were enslaved in 1850.

Alexander reviews US racial history from the colonies to the Clinton administration, delineating its transformation into the ‘war on drugs.’ She offers an 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’. —Miami Herald.