The New Jim Crow (10th Anniversary Edition)

Alexander argues in 'The New Jim Crow' that the US War on Drugs (launched by Reagan and escalated under Clinton - years in which drug use was actually in decline) has led directly to the mass incarceration of the young adult male African American population in the US. She uses an impressive array of statistical data to support her claim that the rhetoric of the drugs war, though 'racially sanitized', has produced a "new system of racialized social control" and that this development has been facilitated by the courts (including the US Supreme Court) which have turned a blind eye to racial bias in law enforcement by police, prosecutors and judges. Some of the statistical materials that Alexander provides to support her arguments are scarcely believable. Take, for example, the fact that in major US cities up to 80% of all young African American males now have a criminal record; that in at least 15 US states the rate of imprisonment of blacks on drugs charges is 20 to 50 times higher than that of whites (even though the evidence shows that white youths are more likely to be involved in drug usage), and that over 31 million people have been arrested for drugs offences since the War on Drugs began. The savage sentencing powers of judges are also difficult to comprehend. For instance, a 10-year prison sentence can be imposed for possession of a small quantity of marijuana; a 5-year minimum sentence is mandatory for simple possession of cocaine, and life sentences are regarded as "perfectly appropriate" for first-time drug offenders. Even the death penalty is allowed for certain drugs-related crimes. Alexander also notes that the US now has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, imprisoning a much higher proportion of its population than, say, Russia, China, Iran or even apartheid South Africa. The devastating consequences of imprisonment are compounded by what Alexander calls 'legalized discrimination' experienced by those who have been imprisoned, including lifetime bans on voting and jury service as well as restrictions on access to public housing, employment, education and welfare benefits. "For a minor offense", Alexander writes, "you can be subjected to discrimination, scorn, and exclusion for the rest of your life." Mass incarceration, she argues, has created a caste system whose members are "permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society" on a scale "unparalleled in world history". In short, "mass incarceration, like its predecessor Jim Crow, creates and maintains racial segregation." This is a truly astonishing book and the writing is powerful and passionate. But this is not exaggerated polemic. There are over 30 pages of notes and references at the end of the book and Alexander is meticulous in providing chapter and verse to support her arguments. The New Jim Crow is shocking and makes very disturbing reading.

Importante leitura para se entender um pouco mais de cono tudo era ainda pior há alguns anos.

Bien

En plus cité dans le dernier numéro de Chéribibi mag!!! Pose de bonnes questions et essaie d'y répondre intelligemment, donc lecture recommandée!

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.