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

by Michelle Alexander

  55 James Forman Jr., “Children, Cops and Citizenship: Why Conservatives Should Oppose Racial Profiling,” in Invisible Punishment, ed. Mauer and Lind, 159.

  56 Wideman, “Doing Time, Marking Race.”

  57 See discussion of stigma in chapter 4.

  58 See, e.g., Charles Ogletree and Austin Sarat, eds., From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America (New York: New York University Press, 2006); and Joy James, The New Abolitionists: (Neo) Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings (New York: State University of New York Press, 2005).

  59 See discussion of polling data in chapter 3.

  60 Glenn C. Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 82.

  61 Ibid., 82-83.

  62 Craig Reinarman, “The Crack Attack: America’s Latest Drug Scare, 1986- 1992” in Images of Issues: Typifying Contemporary Social Problems (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1995), 162.

  63 Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, rev. ed. (New York: The New Press, 2006), 150.

  64 Ibid., 151

  65 Ibid.

  66 See Musto, American Disease, 4, 7, 43-44, 219-20; and Doris Marie Provine, Unequal Under Law, 37-90

  67 Eric Schlosser, “Reefer Madness,” Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 1994, 49.

  68 Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 149.

  69 The most compelling version of this argument has been made by Randall Kennedy in Race, Crime and the Law (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).

  70 Tracy Meares, “Charting Race and Class Differences in Attitudes Toward Drug Legalization and Law Enforcement: Lessons for Federal Criminal Law,” 1 Buffalo Criminal Law Review 1 (1997): 137; Stephen Bennett and Alfred Tuchfarber, “The Social Structural Sources of Cleavage on Law and Order Policies,” American Journal of Political Science 19 (1975): 419-38; and Sandra Browning and Ligun Cao, “The Impact of Race on Criminal Justice Ideology,” Justice Quarterly 9 (Dec. 1992): 685-99.

  71 Meares, “Charting Race and Class Differences,” 157.

  72 Glenn Loury, “Listen to the Black Community,” Public Interest, Sept. 22, 1994, 35.

  73 Meares, “Charting Race and Class Differences,” 160-61.

  74 See William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 22, citing Delbert Elliott study.

  75 Glenn C. Loury, Race, Incarceration and American Values (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 81, commentary by Tommie Shelby.

  76 See Troy Duster, “Pattern, Purpose, and Race in the Drug War: The Crisis of Credibility in Criminal Justice,” in Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice , ed. Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

  77 Loïc Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” 53.

  78 john a. powell, Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, personal communication, Jan. 2007.

  Chapter 6: The Fire This Time

  1 Salim Muwakkil, “Jena and the Post-Civil Rights Fallacy,” In These Times, Oct. 16, 2007.

  2 Democracy Now, “Rev. Al Sharpton: Jena Marks ‘Beginning of a 21st Century Rights Movement,’” Sept. 21, 2007, www.democracynow.org/shows/2007/9/21.

  3 See Derrick Bell, “Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation,” Yale Law Journal 85 (1976): 470.

  4 Lani Guinier, Lift Every Voice (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1998), 220-21.

  5 Ibid., 222.

  6 See Michael Klarman, “The Racial Origins of Modern Criminal Procedure,” Michigan Law Review 99 (2000): 48, 86; Dan Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, 2d ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 52- 53; and Mark Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1969 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 28-29.

  7 Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 43.

  8 Martin Luther King Jr. and Claybourne Carson, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Grand Central, 2001), 44.

  9 See Abby Rapoport, “The Work That Remains: A Forty-Year Update of the Kerner Commission Report,” Economic Policy Institute, Nov. 19, 2008.

  10 Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), 97.

  11 Ibid., 90.

  12 Ibid., 91.

  13 In 1972, the total rate of incarceration (prison and jail) was approximately 160 per 100,000. Today, it is about 760 per 100,000. A reduction of 79 percent would be needed to get back to the 160 figure—itself a fairly high number when judged by international standards.

  14 Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate (New York: The New Press, 1999), 11.

  15 Christopher Sherman, “Cheney, Gonzales, Indicted Over Prisons,” Washington Times, Nov. 19, 2008.

  16 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Corrections Corporation of America, Form 10K for the fiscal year ended Dec. 31, 2005.

  17 Silja J.A. Talvi, “On the Inside with the American Correctional Association,” in Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration, ed. Tara Herivel and Paul Wright (New York: The New Press, 2007).

  18 Stephanie Chen, “Larger Inmate Population Is Boon to Private Prisons,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 28, 2008.

  19 See generally Herivel and Wright, Prison Profiteers. For an excellent discussion of how surplus capital, labor, and land helped to birth the prison industry in rural America, see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

  20 For more information on racial impact statements, see Marc Mauer, “Racial Impact Statements as a Means of Reducing Unwarranted Sentencing Disparities,” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 5 (2007): 19.

  21 Guinier, Lift Every Voice, 223.

  22 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994), 84-88.

  23 Gerald Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? (University of Chicago Press, 1991), 52.

  24 Michael Klarman, “Brown, Racial Change, and the Civil Rights Movement,” Virginia Law Review 80 (1994): 7, 9.

  25 See ibid., arguing that Brown was “merely a ripple” with only a “negligible effect” on the South and civil rights advocacy.

  26 See David Garrow, “Hopelessly Hollow History: Revisionist Devaluing of Brown v. Board of Education,” Virginia Law Review 80 (1994): 151, persuasively making the case that Brown was a major inspiration to civil rights activists and provoked a fierce white backlash.

  27 Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), 5, 187; William Spelman, “The Limited Importance of Prison Expansion,” in The Crime Drop in America, ed. Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 97-129; and Todd R. Clear, Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 41-48.

  28 See, e.g., Todd Clear, Imprisoning Communities, 3.

  29 Jeffrey Reiman makes a similar argument in The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, 8th ed. (New York: Allyn & Bacon, 2006), although he mostly ignores the distinctive role of race in structuring the criminal justice system.

  30 See “Study Finds Whites Anxious About Race,” Bryant Park Project, National Public Radio, Dec. 3, 2007.

  31 Fox Butterfield, “With Cash Tight, States Reassess Long Jail Terms,” New York Times, Nov. 10, 2003.

  32 Marc Mauer, “State Sentencing Reforms: Is the ‘Get Tough’ Era Coming to a Close?” Federal Sentencing Reporter 15, no. 1 (Oct. 2002).

  33 Abby Goodnough, “Relaxing Marijuana Law Has Some Nervous,” New York Times, Dec. 18, 2008, noting that eleven states have decriminalized first-time possession of marijuana.

  34 For example, the ballot argument drafted by civil rights groups opposed to Proposition 54, a 2003 California bal
lot initiative that would have banned the collection of racial data by the state government, read: “We all want a colorblind society. But we won’t get there by banning information.”

  35 Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963), 45-48.

  36 Ibid., 31-32.

  37 See Mary Frances Berry, “Vindicating Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Road to a Color-Blind Society,” Journal of Negro History 81, no. 1-4 (Winter-Autumn 1996): 137, 140.

  38 Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 167.

  39 Fred L. Pincus, Reverse Discrimination: Dismantling the Myth (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003).

  40 Rapoport, “The Work That Remains.”

  41 For an analysis of the impact of incarceration on unemployment, poverty, and education, see Western, Punishment and Inequality in America, 83-131.

  42 Jesse Rothstein and Albert Yoon, “Affirmative Action in Law School Admissions: What Do Racial Preferences Do?” National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, Aug. 2008, www.nber.org/papers/w14276.

  43 Steinberg, Turning Back, 195-96.

  44 Martin Luther King Jr., “A Testament of Hope,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: HarperCollins, 1986), 321.

  45 Ibid., 315.

  46 Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 114.

  47 Ibid.

  48 See Sentencing Project, 2008 Presidential Platforms on Criminal Justice (Washington, DC, Mar. 2008), www.sentencingproject.org/tmp/File/PresidentialCandidatesPlatforms.pdf.

  49 Drew Harwell, “Obama’s Drug Use Debated,” CBS News, UWIRE.com, Feb. 12, 2008.

  50 David Hunt, “Obama Fields Questions on Jacksonville Crime,” Florida Times-Union, Sept. 22, 2008.

  51 United States Government Accountability Office, Report to the Chairman, Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Community Policing Grants: COPS Grants Were a Modest Contribution to Decline in Crime in 1990s, GAO-06-104, Oct. 2005, www.gao.gov/new/items/d06104.pdf.

  52 John L. Worrall and Tomislav V. Kovandzic, “COPS Grants and Crime Revisited,” Criminology 45, no. 1 (Feb. 2007): 159-90.

  53 Gary Fields, “White House Czar Calls for End of ‘War on Drugs,’” Wall Street Journal, May 24, 2009; see also Office of National Drug Control Policy, White House Drug Control Budget, FY2010 Funding Highlights (May 2009).

  54 Guinier and Torres, Miner’s Canary, 118.

  55 Ibid.

  56 See Lani Guinier, “From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy: Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Divergence Dilemma,” Journal of American History 92 (June 2004): 103, citing C. Arnold Anderson, “Social Class Differentials in the Schooling of Youth Within the Regions and Community-Size Groups of the United States,” Social Forces 25 (May 1947): 440, 436; and C. Arnold Anderson, “Inequalities in Schooling in the South,” American Journal of Sociology 60 (May 1955): 549, 553, 557.

  57 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Free Press, 1935), 700.

  58 Guinier, “Racial Liberalism,” 102. See also Beth Roy, Bitters in the Honey: Tales of Hope and Disappointment Across Divides of Race and Time (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999), 318; and Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 270.

  59 See Derrick Bell, “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93 (1980): 518, 525; David J. Armor, Forced Justice: School Desegregation and the Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 174- 93, 206-7; and Robert J. Norrell, “Labor at the Ballot Box: Alabama Politics from the New Deal to the Dixiecrat Movement,” Journal of Southern History 57 (May 1991): 201, 227, 233, 234.

  60 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Bantam, 1989).

  61 For a more detailed exploration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s journey from civil rights to human rights, see Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); and Stewart Burns, To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Sacred Mission to Save America (New York: Harper One, 2005).

  62 For background on the nature, structure, and history of human rights, see Cynthia Soohoo et al., eds., Bringing Human Rights Home, vol. 1 (New York: Praeger, 2007).

  63 Stewart Burns, “America, You Must Be Born Again,” Sojourners 33, no. 1, (Jan. 2004): 14.

  64 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1962, 1993), 5-10.

  Index

  affirmative action; and black exceptionalism; and colorblindness; and minority police officers/police chiefs; and poor and working-class whites

  Alexander v. Sandoval

  All of Us or None

  American Apartheid (Massey and Denton)

  American Bar Association (ABA)

  American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU): class action lawsuit against California Highway Patrol; Drug Law Reform Project; Racial Justice Project

  American Correctional Association

  The American Dilemma (Myrdal)

  The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Loury)

  Angelos, Weldon

  Anti-Drug Abuse Act (1986/1988)

  Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor (Davis)

  Armstrong, Christopher Lee

  Armstrong v. United States

  Atwater v. City of Lago Vista

  The Audacity of Hope (Obama)

  Bacon’s Rebellion

  Baldus, David, and Baldus study

  Baldwin, James

  Ball, Johnny Lee

  Ban the Box campaigns

  Banks, Tyra

  Bascuas, Ricardo

  Batson v. Kentucky

  Beckett, Katherine

  Bell, Derrick

  Bennett, Lerone, Jr.

  bias, racial: implicit/explicit (conscious/ unconscious); and plea bargaining; and prosecutors

  Biden, Joe

  “birdcage” metaphor and structural racism

  black churches

  black codes and vagrancy laws

  black exceptionalism

  Blackmon, Douglas

  blaxploitation

  Blumenson, Eric

  Boggs Act (1951)

  Bostick, Terrance

  Boyd, Marcus

  Braman, Donald

  Brennan, Justice William

  British Society for the Abolition of Slavery

  Brown, James

  Brown v. Board of Education

  Bryant, Scott

  Burton, Susan

  Bush, George H.W.

  Bush, George W.

  Byrd, Robert

  Byrne grant program

  Cahill, Clyde

  California Highway Patrol (CHP)

  California v. Acevedo

  California’s Proposition

  California’s Proposition

  Campbell, Richard

  Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin)

  Carroll, David

  Carrollton bus disaster (1988)

  Cato Institute

  Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

  Chain Reaction (Edsall and Edsall)

  Chemerinsky, Erwin

  Cheney, Dick

  Chicago, Illinois: ex-offenders; police presence in ghetto communities; re-entry programs

  child-support debts

  chokeholds, lethal

  Chunn, Gwendolyn

  Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act (2000)

  Civil Rights Act (1866)

  Civil Rights Act (1964); Title VI

  civil rights advocacy, future of; changing the culture of law enforcement; collective denial by civil rights advocates; dismantling the mass incarceration system; and flawed public consensus; grassroots activism by former
ly incarcerated men and women; human rights paradigm/ approach; Obama presidency; poor and working-class whites; and problem of colorblind advocacy; reconsidering affirmative action; reform work and movement building; reluctance to advocate on behalf of criminals; and sentencing; and trickle-down theories of racial justice

  Civil Rights Movement; backlash against; and black people who defied racial stereotypes; desegregation protests; and economic justice; and end of Jim Crow system; and federal legislation; and human rights approach; initial resistance from some African Americans; and King’s call for complete restructuring of society; Poor People’s Movement

  civil rights organizations/community; collective denial by; professionalization and conversion of grassroots movement into legal crusade; reluctance to advocate on behalf of criminals. See also civil rights advocacy, future of

  Clary, Edward

  Clinton, Bill/Clinton administration; federal drug programs; marijuana use; militarization of War on Drugs; public housing and eviction rules; “tough on crime” policies/legislation; and War on Drugs; welfare reform legislation

  Cloward, Richard