Analysis of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

In The New Jim Crow, by associate professor Michelle Alexander, Alexander adamantly fights for her readers to recognize the severity of racism entrenched in our social and political systems. She does this by describing how Jim Crow laws of the past have disguised itself into a new racially oppressive system: mass incarceration in the war on drugs. Furthermore, in the core of the book, she zooms in on three reasons why young black men are more likely to be charged with crimes during and after the Civil Rights Movement and three reasons why they are more likely to be imprisoned.

Young black men were more likely to be charged with crimes due to three central reasons. The first reason is due to the aggressive reaction of southern governors and law enforcement officials towards the Civil Rights movement. In the late 1950s, southern conservatives argued that the civil rights given to black people were directly proportional to the rate and severity of crime in the nation. Although in reality this is widely false, the FBI was surprisingly reporting increases in the national crime rates. For instance, street crime quadrupled and homicide rates doubled (A, 41). However, what the public did not know about this increase was that it was due to the young adults of the baby boom generation, and not young black men (A, 41). Consequently, this stigmatized the relationship between young black men and the law, thus making them more likely to be charged with crime.

Another reason why young black men were more likely to be charged with crime was due to the widespread misconception that black people were the most active in drug abusing and selling, thereby striking a racial profile. Although statistically false, what fostered this misunderstanding was the unjust approach police officers and prosecutors took when pinpointing the ambiguous identity of a drug user. Police officers would associate black men and drugs and activate a vicious cycle of misrepresentation and an unfair amount of charges. For example, African Americans made up 80 to 90 percent of drug offenders in prison but in actuality, only 15 percent of African Americans abused drugs (A, 98 & 106). On the other side of the spectrum, whites have actually been proven to abuse drugs at a much higher rate than blacks. In 2000, for example, a study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse suggested that white students use cocaine at a rate seven times greater than that of black students, and heroin is abused by whites at a rate seven times greater than that of blacks (A, 99).

Thirdly, Alexander addresses why black men were more likely to be charged with crimes when discussing unwarranted searches. As police officers were incentivized to imprison drug abusers as the war on drugs was a hot topic, consent searches and pretext stops allowed officers to search “reasonable” people when given consent, which was very loosely applied. Consequently, racial profiling and unwarranted searches worked together and large amounts of searches against black people were conducted, whether the officers realized it or not. For instance, over three thousand bags in a nine-month period were searched by one officer alone (A, 64). Unfortunately, it got even worse. In 1984, the Drug Enforcement Agency launched Operation Pipeline, which intensified this tactic by training more than 25,000 officers in forty-eight states to target “suspicious” people (A, 70).

Once charged, these black suspects have a hard time getting out of the system, as Alexander describes. For example, two ways black people are more likely to be imprisoned is due to their misrepresentation under the law (or none at all), and the saddening option of plea bargaining. When in the courtroom, many criminal defendants, about 80 percent, do not even have the ability to hire a lawyer (A, 85). A major reason for this is simply due to the finances, as anyone that makes over $3,000 a year is deemed wealthy enough to not have one supplied for them (A, 85). In these cases, due to the lack of representation, the defendants plead guilty simply because they did not know their legal rights. Alongside this, many black defendants end up in imprisonment through plea bargaining — whether guilty or not. Plea bargaining pressures defendants into pleading guilty by threatening them with extremely long sentences if they decide to fight for their innocence. This leads to many unjustified imprisonments, where about 2 to 5 percent of people in prison are innocent, a statistic Alexander stresses to be small but significant (A, 89).

Lastly, the corrupt system that sends many defendants to prison for long periods of time is mandatory sentencing. As a single case of selling 672 grams of crack cocaine can face life imprisonment, supporters of mandatory sentencing argue that it keeps “violent criminals” off the street, despite most of these cases not being violent at all. Judges are given no option to offer less harsh sentences to low-level offenders even if they wanted to, such as Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who verbally disagreed with the unjust system of mandatory minimum sentencing (A, 93).

As Alexander states throughout her book, many ex-offenders cannot recover in terms of housing, food, and employment due to the disparaging label they are given. A policy that needs to be changed to alleviate this pressure is that which disallows people with drug-related felony convictions from receiving public assistance programs such as TANF. This change can alleviate the recovery process, and is one step in the right direction in acknowledging these felons as first-class citizens rather than victims of a new Jim Crow.