Summary and Analysis of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness: Based on the Book by Michelle Alexander
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Summary and Analysis of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness: Based on the Book by Michelle Alexander
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This short summary and analysis of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander includes:
- Historical context
- Chapter-by-chapter summaries
- Detailed timeline of key events
- Profiles of the main characters
- Important quotes
- Fascinating trivia
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- Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work
About The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander:
Legal scholar and civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander’s invaluable and timely work, The New Jim Crow, examines what she calls the new racial caste system in United States: mass incarceration.
Following the practices of slavery and institutional discrimination, Alexander argues, mass incarceration is part of America’s legacy to dehumanize and disenfranchise African Americans and Latinos. According to Alexander, “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
Thanks in a large part to the War on Drugs, more than two million people are in America’s prisons today—an overwhelming majority of them are people of color who’ve been jailed for minor drug charges. When these adults leave prison, they are often denied employment, housing, the right to vote, and a quality education. As a result, they are rarely able to integrate successfully into society.
The New Jim Crow is a well-argued call to dismantle a system of policies that continues to deny civil rights, decades after the passing of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504043137 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Worth Books |
| Publication date: | 11/29/2016 |
| Series: | Smart Summaries |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 30 |
| Sales rank: | 960,146 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Summary and Analysis of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Based on the Book by Michelle Alexander
By Worth Books
Worth Books
Copyright © 2016 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4313-7
CHAPTER 1
Summary
Introduction
Generations of black men have been disenfranchised and locked out of the political system due to citizenship laws, racial intimidation and violence, voting laws, and, now, mass incarceration.
While many activists who declare mass incarceration the "new Jim Crow" are dismissed as misguided or laughable, Alexander suggests that their claims are founded on some disturbing truths, such as the Central Intelligence Agency's 1998 confession that, in order to protect US interests in the country, it supported and protected Nicaraguan drug cartels that also happened to be pumping crack cocaine into poor, urban African American communities.
To further introduce and support her central claim, Alexander offers the sociological theory that "... governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control" even when the rates and categories of crimes do not warrant it. Crime rates in the United States were about the same as other developed countries before the War on Drugs — even below some of them — but the imprisoned population has increased exponentially and remains higher. The United States also imprisons more of its racial minorities than any other country.
Need to Know: Criminalization of black people is the new Jim Crow; the institutionalized mass incarceration of citizens creates a racial caste system just like discriminatory practices of the past.
Chapter One
Although there are successful African Americas today — most notably Barack Obama — the caste system has continued to grow and morph; even during slavery and Jim Crow there were exceptions, i.e., freemen and wealthy blacks.
Throughout slavery and in the wake of Bacon's Rebellion, Reconstruction and the rise of the multiracial Populist movement, and the Civil Rights Movement and the breakdown of segregation, the white elite sowed racial hostility and leveraged the financial anxieties of poor whites to break coalitions and sustain racial hierarchy. This was often accomplished through "racial bribes," giving poor whites rewards and privileges based on their skin color to separate them from blacks, with whom they may have shared economic and political interests.
After the Civil Rights era, conservative whites needed a "race neutral" way to preserve the hierarchy, now that law prevented them from using race to do so. Led by Richard Nixon, they turned to the idea of "law and order," failing to distinguish between civil disobedience and crime. New party lines were drawn with "crime" as the code word for "black." Conservative Republicans intentionally sought to appeal to those white voters with deep fears of and hatred for African Americans, including whites who had been longtime Democrats.
Due to high unemployment in the late seventies, crime rose among fifteen- to twenty-four-year-old men. But instead of exploring the complex demographic causes for crime, the media oversimplified the situation. Riots in urban areas in the '60s in response to episodes of police brutality fed the narrative that civil rights for African American begot more crime. Even black activists called for severe punishment for crimes in order to prevent black communities and racial progress from being unraveled. Conservatives asserted that poverty was caused by culture (read: black culture) rather than structural inequities.
Despite the fact that drug crime was not seen as a priority to most Americans, the Reagan administration launched a War on Drugs, even before the introduction of crack cocaine into poor black communities. And by feeding exaggerated, fear-mongering stories to the media and the public, it began a new system for racial control.
The national incarcerated population soared from 350,000 to 2.3 million in a decade and a half due to policies, not crime rates. The Reagan administration ignored powder cocaine — mostly used by whites — and focused on the less expensive crack cocaine, used more often by poor blacks. In many states, more than ninety percent of prisoners were African American or Latino. Subsequent administrations on both sides of the political spectrum did not want to appear weak on crime and thus the war continued.
Need to Know: Alexander lays out three cyclical efforts to disenfranchise and subjugate African Americans: slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. Whenever one of these was threatened or began to fail, anti-black political elite evolved these structures into new methods of maintaining power and blocking the majority of the black population's meaningful engagement in the United States' economic, political, and civic life.
Chapter Two
The War on Drugs did not take down powerful drug cartels; the majority of people arrested were not accused of serious offenses and were not selling drugs — they were only using or possessing them. In fact, the Supreme Court empowers law enforcement to disregard the Fourth Amendment, allowing them to ask pedestrians, drivers, and bus passengers if they can search their belongings without explicit directions that they can refuse or remain silent during these police interactions.
Additionally, the federal government incentivizes drug arrests — but not for more serious crimes such as murder and rape — through funding and military equipment. This leads some districts to pressure their officers to meet quotas which in turn mean unnecessary and unethical shakedowns of individuals and communities based on mere assumptions. The Drug Enforcement Agency actually trains its officers on how to use unnecessary traffic stops to then conduct unwarranted searches for drugs. Most innocent civilians do not report these unlawful searches due to intimidation or fear of retaliation, so what gets the most media attention are the times when police officers' "hunches" happen to be correct by chance.
During unnecessary, aggressive searches and arrests, property is often destroyed and innocent bystanders and families are sometimes harmed when SWAT teams burst into homes to snatch minor offenders and take them to jail. Any possessions confiscated during these arrests must be forfeited — even if the person is later found innocent. Police officers have rights to claim the property. Only the few "kingpins" who have enough property worth anything can leverage it for their release, while those who are poor — most of the defendants arrested — have little with which to bargain.
Prosecutors have almost unchecked power to overcharge individuals with heavy sentences that scare them into pleading guilty, even if they are innocent. This is often done without a defense lawyer present. Even if released on probation or parole, the brand of "felon" remains; an individual will have a criminal record that stays with them.
Reducing the minimum jail time sentence for drug offenders does solve the problem of mass incarceration. However, once labeled a felon, a person is stripped of basic American rights, even if they didn't spend time in prison.
Need to Know: Under the banner of the "War on Drugs," the system mass incarceration has created and legalized — from the Supreme Court down to police offers — the stopping, searching, arresting, taking possession of personal property, detaining, and prosecuting of innocent citizens or those who committed minor crimes — leaving them with the label of felon which blocks them from full participation in economic and civic life and renders them second-class citizens.
The government has condoned ineffective practices — not based on actual rise in crime — under the guise of eliminating major drug criminals, but these efforts mostly affect people innocent of any crime or those with minor drug offenses, who are, more often than not, poor and black.
Chapter Three
Most of the arrests and tactics described in Chapter 2 occur in black, poor neighborhoods. Data reveals that blacks and Latinos make up seventy-five percent of those incarcerated for drug crimes, even though the majority of drug offenders are white. Although some may suggest that violence in poor black and brown communities may account for the incarceration rates of these populations, Alexander's research reveals that cases involving murder and violent crimes tend to get more media attention which makes it appear as if violence is pervasive and increasing.
But violent crime rates have been oscillating throughout the War on Drugs, and research shows that there is little connection between the increasing imprisonment rates and the crime rates. So violent crime — often attributed to black communities — simply does not account for the rise of mass incarceration. If that is the case, how does the American justice system imprison so many people of color without using explicit racial language or overtly discriminatory (i.e., colorblind) laws?
The answer is that the Supreme Court has given power to police while stripping citizens of their agency to exercise basic constitutional rights. In Whren v. United States, the Court permitted police officers to use their discretion about whom to stop and search based simply on how a person looks, allowing implicit bias to interfere with judgment and lead to disproportionate targeting and undue suspicion of black people.
In a series of other Supreme Court cases, including McCleskey v. Kemp and Armstrong v. United States, the Justices barred broader evidence of systemic racial bias from being considered in the arrests, charges, and sentencing of individual cases, thus hiding ingrained racial bias behind the veil of colorblindness. While the Court noted that evidence in these cases supported the idea that systemic biases existed, the justices again and again upheld that this information could not be applied to individual cases — namely racially targeted arrests, increased charges, and heavier sentencing — if no explicit and intentional racist language or action occurred in the defendant's case. And the very information needed to prove racial prejudice — prosecutors' charges against whites accused of the same crime — can only be given by prosecutors, who more often than not refuse to do so.
The power of prosecutors is also protected by the Supreme Court. All-white juries are easily crafted by eliminating black jurors for "race-neutral" reasons such as education, neighborhood, hair, clothing, economic and employment status, etc.
Alexander explores how race-neutral approaches and implicit bias can play a role in perpetuating the mass incarceration of black defendants. Meanwhile, the units tasked with eliminating drugs, guns, and other criminal resources from the streets were actually not effective or did not account for a high percentage of useful arrests.
Need to Know: Supreme Court decisions have given police officers, prosecutors, and other parties of the justice system wide channels to stop, arrest, charge, sentence, and convict black and brown citizens based on their races under guises of race-neutrality and also prevented citizens any real means to point out and challenge discriminatory practices in the justice system.
Chapter Four
Parole and probation — once a person has served time or has just been labeled a felon — have created a second caste of black and brown people. Criminal records bar poor people from public housing, which can lead to many parents losing their children to foster care. People can be booted from public housing even if they are unaware that illegal behaviors are happening in their homes. A number of states and licensing boards make it lawful for employers to deny employment based on previous felony charges, regardless of the ability for the prosecutor to successfully defend their case.
Even if they are able to find a job, many felons accrue massive debt from drug testing, child support, probation departments, monthly supervision fees, court fees, etc. Many must consistently pay into the system that imprisoned them — very much like a sharecropper during Jim Crow — making it hard to earn a living. Even feeding themselves becomes a challenge, as President Bill Clinton enacted a five- year limit to food stamp benefits and universally banned those with drug- related felony charges from using them.
Additionally, voting rights and the ability to perform jury service are stripped away. Even when they are granted, the bureaucratic red-tape this population must endure to re-earn their voting rights can be so daunting and intimidating, many never succeed in doing so. Ex-offenders are intimidated through police brutality, racial profiling, and the possibility of their parole being reversed. In many cases, parolees are so wary of governmental officials, and any attention they may bring to themselves, they choose not to vote. This fear aligns with the fears of those of color trying to vote under Jim Crow laws and with the Klan's scare tactics.
Alexander delves into the psychological and social effects of parolees and ex-offenders, including shame, family resentment, and struggling alone, and explores reasons why "gangsta" culture has surfaced, discussing the psychological and political reasons groups embrace the stigma that is consistently launched at them.
Need to Know: Even once out of prison or cleared as innocent, those with felony charges or convictions are legally ostracized politically, economically, and socially, leading to a cycle of debt, more prison time, and psychological depression.
Chapter Five
Despite mass incarceration and the drug war being a central problem, people tend to call for more personal responsibility or point out issues such as unemployment and discrimination. In a state of denial, Americans rely on easy assumptions from the media and pop culture and the belief that these people "deserve" it. Alexander describes the system as a birdcage, with each aspect outlined in the previous chapters serving as one of many bars that blocks black people from full citizenship. While ostracizing lawbreakers is as old as civilization, previous systems only affected small portions of their populations, while the current system has become a prominent fixture of black communities and of America as a whole.
Here, Alexander demonstrates how various aspects of the system of mass incarceration parallel the previous system of oppression, Jim Crow. In both, conservative white elites pitted poor whites against blacks rather than offer reforms to solve economic inequities. Here are other similarities:
• Both relied on lawful discrimination.
• Both rendered blacks with the inability to vote or serve on a jury.
• The Supreme Court, through cases such as Dred Scott v. Sanford, Plessy v. Ferguson, and McCleskey v. Kemp, upheld the racial caste system by invalidating black people's ability to contest constitutional rights violations.
• Both use forms of segregation; in the case of mass incarceration, the system funnels black people into prisons and then to ghettos away from white people.
• Both involve the "the symbolic production of race" or define what it means to be black (i.e., blacks were slaves, then they were second-class citizens, now they are criminals) — which affects the entire race with the stigma.
• Both maintain "race-neutral" laws (poll taxes and literacy tests during Jim Crow and drug laws and sentencing technically applied to everyone but they were meant to specifically exclude black people).
The apparent differences between the two systems of control are actually rather minor and strengthen the new system.
• Jim Crow segregation helped to build black solidarity, mass incarceration undermines that cohesion, breaking community and family ties.
• There is less "racial hostility" in the public arena — integration, diversity, and the idea that it is un-American to be racist — this leads to "racial indifference" because to many Americans feel "race doesn't matter" and therefore it is easier to see mass incarceration as a colorblind, crime-focused system.
• While white people are not arrested and convicted as often, the new system directly affects them as they fall under the same hard drug laws as blacks. If only people of color were affected by mass incarceration, there would be more protests because whites and other Americans want to perceive their society as nonracist. Sacrificing some whites to mass incarceration demonstrates for many that it is a fair, colorblind system.
• Although there seems to be black support for mass incarceration, it may actually be that blacks are forced into a position between losing their young people or accepting tougher crime policies, when they would rather have better education systems and more employment opportunities. Alexander explores the long history of the "politics of respectability," or the idea that black people must act well-mannered and well-behaved at all costs in order to "prove" to white people that they deserve equality. Alexander argues that the politics of respectability will always fail because it suggests that black people cannot be human or make mistakes — the same mistakes that whites make but are not punished as severely for (if they are punished at all).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summary and Analysis of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Worth Books. Copyright © 2016 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Worth Books.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Context,Overview,
Summary,
Timeline,
Cast of Characters,
Direct Quotes and Analysis,
Trivia,
What's That Word?,
Critical Response,
About Michelle Alexander,
For Your Information,
Bibliography,
Copyright,