[A-List] Imprisoned Future: Mass Incarceration and the "New Jim Crow, "

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Imprisoned Future: Mass Incarceration and the "New Jim Crow," an
Interview with Michelle Alexander

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/9469/

By Joel Wendland
	

Editor's note: Michelle Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow:
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

PA: What inspired you to undertake your investigation of the mass
incarceration of people of color in the United States?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: I was deeply concerned about the lack of attention
being paid to mass incarceration in communities of color by
traditional civil rights organizations and African American leaders. I
myself didn’t fully appreciate the magnitude of the harm caused by the
war on drugs and mass incarceration until I began working in
communities of color representing victims of racial profiling and
police brutality, and working with people who were struggling to
“re-enter” society after being branded a felon. I had a series of
experiences working on behalf of people struggling within the new
caste system before I had my awakening, and, once I did, I began to
see and understand, and to listen more carefully to the stories of the
people who are cycling in and out of the criminal justice system. I
then began a journey of research and study, of trying to understand
better what was actually happening in ghetto communities as a result
of our criminal justice policies, and what I found astounded me. Today
there are more African Americans under correctional control, in prison
or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850 a decade
before the Civil War began. There are more African Americans
disenfranchised today than in 1870, the year the 15th Amendment was
ratified explicitly prohibiting laws that deny the right to vote on
the basis of race.

In major American cities today, cities like Chicago, the majority of
working age African American men have criminal records and are thus
subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. They
can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries,
legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to public
education, and food stamps. So many of the old forms of discrimination
that we supposedly left behind are suddenly legal again once you’ve
been branded a felon. So really quite belatedly I came to see that
despite all the fanfare over the election of Barack Obama and our
so-called color blind society, we have not ended racial caste in
America – we’ve merely redesigned it – and the relative silence, the
eerie quiet from the civil rights community, including folks like me,
who, as I said, didn’t get it at first and African American leaders
motivated me to write this book. It’s an effort to kind of ring the
alarm bell, which has been rung by others before, but I fear has not
been rung loudly enough. It is my hope to spark more discussion and
dialogue and hopefully contribute to the building of a mass movement
to end mass incarceration.

PA: Your title, The New Jim Crow, suggests a systematic implementation
of this caste system, as you call it. What do you see as the
relationship between the purpose and function of the old Jim Crow and
this new system?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: As I describe in the book, I believe that every
caste system in the United States has been deeply linked to the
economic structure of our society at the time. Slavery was primarily a
system of exploitation where black labor was stolen for profit. Jim
Crow was a system primarily of subordination, in which African
Americans were permanently locked into a lower tier of jobs, unable to
compete or obtain the skills necessary to obtain higher-status jobs
and higher-wage jobs. But mass incarceration isn’t primarily about
exploitation or subordination, it’s about marginalization and
elimination, the disposal of a group of people who are no longer
viewed as essential to the functioning of our economy. Now that we
have transitioned from a more agrarian economy to an industrial one,
to what is now a globalized service-based economy, unskilled black
labor is no longer viewed as essential to the functioning of the US
economy – it’s no longer needed to pick cotton in the fields or labor
in factories. African American men, and increasingly Latinos, are
rounded up in droves and warehoused, put in cages.

As I discuss a fair amount in the book, the war on drugs really could
not have come at a worse time for the African American community. At
the time the war on drugs was declared, inner city black communities
across the United States were suffering from economic collapse as a
result of the disappearance of industrial jobs from urban centers
across America. As recently as 1970 in cities like Chicago, about 70
percent of Black men had industrial employment. By the early and
mid-1980s, as the drug war was kicking off, that figure had plummeted
to below 30 percent. So hundreds of thousands of people were suddenly
out of work as factories closed down and moved overseas. We could have
responded to this crisis in our inner city communities – and so many
of these factories had been located in the inner cities in order to
have quick access to cheap black labor. We could have responded to
this crisis with an outpouring of support. Stimulus packages and
bailout plans could have been devised to help ensure that black youth
in particular would have been able to make the rough transition from
an industrial to a service-based economy, but no – instead we ended
welfare as we knew it and declared the war on drugs.

PA: You mention the role of major economic shifts. Another thing that
was happening in the 1990s was a decline in state budgets and a push
for privatization, even of prisons. What is the role of the profit
motive and its impact on the rise of this new era of Jim Crow?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: I do not believe that the get tough movement and
the war on drugs itself was inspired by profit motives. Quite the
contrary, I think the war on drugs and the get tough movement were
traceable to racial politics. The war on drugs was launched in 1982 by
President Ronald Reagan at a time when drug crime was actually on the
decline, not on the rise. It was an effort to appeal to poor and
working class white voters who were resentful of and disaffected by
many of the gains of the civil rights movement, especially busing,
desegregation and affirmative action. Those racial politics gave birth
to mass incarceration.

Now it became readily apparent to many that large profits could be
made from caging human beings, and so there are of course the private
prison corporations that are listed on the New York Stock Exchange and
profit quite directly from mass incarceration. But there is are also a
whole host of other corporate interests that benefit from warehousing
millions of people behind bars – corporations like AT&T that gouge
prisoners families in the rates charged to call people behind bars.
There are the private health care providers who provide typically
abysmal health care but make millions of dollars providing that care
to prisoners. There are the manufacturers of taser guns and all of the
military-like equipment that is provided not only to prison personnel
but also to law enforcement, those charged with waging this literal
war against communities of color. Then there are the prison guard
unions. Prison guard unions have become the largest and most powerful
political lobbying organizations in many states, and they don’t lobby
just for higher wages, they also lobby for three-strike laws and harsh
mandatory minimum drug sentences. Because as long as there is a high
demand for their services, they are guaranteed employment and good
pay. So there is a wide array of individuals, organizations, and
corporate interests that now benefit financially from this system of
control and can be counted on to resist quite fiercely any significant
downsizing of this system.

As you mentioned, states are facing budget crises, and we are seeing
some moves to release some nonviolent offenders early and that sort of
thing. I think we will see what has been consistent growth in the
prison system leveling off and in some places declining a bit. But if
we were to return the rates of incarceration we had just back in the
1970s, at a time when many civil rights organizations thought that
rates of incarceration were just egregiously high, if we were just to
go back to the bad old days of the 1970s, we would have to release
4-out-of-5 people who are in prison today. More than a million people
employed by the criminal justice system would lose their jobs, and
many rural communities that now host large prisons would be especially
hard hit. So in building a movement to end mass incarceration, we have
to take into account the wide range of interests that would be
affected and insure that people who are living in rural communities
are given the opportunity to have decent jobs and aren’t left jobless
in the transition away from mass incarceration, so that they are
turned into allies rather than adversaries in the process of ending
caste in America.

PA: You mentioned the impact of mass incarceration on African American
working families and workers as a way of marginalizing them, as well
as the massive amount of public tax dollars spent on warehousing
prisoners. What about the exploitation of prison labor? Is that still
an issue today?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: It definitely is still an issue, but I don’t want
to mislead people into thinking that in most prisons prisoners are
laboring away for corporations for profit. The typical experience of
someone in prison is idleness, which I think in many ways is even
worse than having the opportunity to do something with yourself during
the day. So while I think it is unconscionable that there are
corporations who are avoiding paying minimum wage, providing decent
benefits, and all of that by employing prison labor, the experience of
being behind bars, locked in a cage day after day and absolutely idle
– so many people find themselves in solitary confinement for large
stretches things like insubordination to a prison guard – that form of
suffering, I think, is as bad or worse than being required to labor
without pay.

PA: What happens to a person in society when they have been marked as
a convict or having had some other interaction with the criminal
justice system?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Often someone is branded a felon even for a crime
as minor as being caught with marijuana – which is a felony in most
states or at least can be charged as a felony. Prosecutors frequently
have the discretion to charge drug possession as either a misdemeanor
or as a felony, and prosecutors exercise that discretion in a
racially-biased manner. Then when you are released from prison with a
relatively minor, nonviolent felony or drug offense, you are subject
to a whole host of legalized discrimination that mirrors in remarkable
ways the forms of discrimination that were legal during Jim Crow.

The most obvious is denial of the right to vote. Forty-eight states
and the District of Columbia deny prisoners the right to vote, but
that is just the tip of the iceberg, because once you are released
from prison you may be denied the right to vote for a period of years
or the rest of your life. Nationwide about one-in-seven or eight
African Americans are denied the right to vote permanently or
temporarily, and in some states the rate is as high as one-in-three or
four Black men. Most people think it is normal to deny the right to
vote to people in prison, but in most Western democracies prisoners
are encouraged to vote, and every effort is made to insure that they
have the opportunity to vote, but not here in the United States. In
other democracies it is unheard of for people to be denied the right
to vote once they are released from prison. But again the mentality
here in the United States is that once you have committed a crime you
may forfeit your right to vote for the rest of your life.

Felons are deemed ineligible for jury service. As a result, all-white
juries have made a roaring comeback in many areas in the country,
where a third or more of African American men have felonies and are
deemed ineligible for jury service. But it is worse than that –
because anyone who has ever had a negative experience with law
enforcement can be stricken from a jury for cause, on the grounds that
they are unlikely to be fair and impartial in a criminal case. So good
luck finding someone in a poor community of color, in a poor Black
community, who has not yet had a negative experience with law
enforcement to justify their exclusion from a jury for cause.

There is denial of the right to vote, exclusion from juries, and
legalized discrimination in employment. It is perfectly legal to
discriminate against people with criminal records in employment.
Virtually every application has a box you have to check if you have
ever been convicted of a felony. It doesn’t matter if your felony
happened yesterday, last week, or 30 years ago, for the rest of your
life you have to check that box, virtually guaranteeing that your
application will be thrown in the trash. Studies have shown that about
70 percent of employers won’t even consider hiring a drug felon, never
mind that most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime. But if
you are caught and you have that “F”, that felony label, your hopes of
getting employment diminish to the vanishing point.

Housing discrimination is perfectly legal in both public and private
housing markets. In fact, if you are branded a felon you are barred
from public housing for a minimum of 5 years, and HUD regulations
encourage discrimination against people with criminal records for
their entire lives. If you are released from prison and stay with a
family member in public housing, they risk eviction, the whole family
risks eviction, as a result of having a “criminal” staying with them.
Growing numbers of homeless shelters also screen for criminal
convictions.

Here you are, newly released from prison, with no job, no housing –
you can’t even stay with your relatives in public housing – so what
are you expected to do? Well, if you’ve been convicted of a drug
felony don’t expect to get food stamps, because thanks to President
Clinton people convicted of drug felonies are barred from food stamps
for the rest of their lives. They are permanently ineligible for food
stamps – pregnant women, people with HIV and AIDS, not even food
stamps are available to you. So what are you supposed to do? How are
you supposed to feed yourself? What you are expected to do typically
is to pay back thousands of dollars in fees, fines, court costs, and
accumulated back child support. In a growing number of states you are
actually expected to pay back the cost of your imprisonment. People
released from prison are saddled with thousands of dollars in debt,
and then up to 100 percent of their wages can be garnished to pay back
all these fees, fines, court costs and accumulated back child support,
and the cost of their imprisonment.

So here you are, one of the lucky few who actually manage to get a job
in the legal economy – and up to 100 percent of your wages can be
garnished? What does the system seem designed to do? I argue it’s
designed to send you right back to prison, which is what in fact
happens about 70 percent of the time. About 70 percent of released
prisoners return to jail within three years, and the majority of those
who do return in a matter of months, because the challenges associated
with just surviving on the outside are so immense.

Then, of course, there is the stigma as well. In many respects the
stigma of being branded a criminal or a felon is as severe and
damaging as the stigma of race during the Jim Crow era. Many people
branded felons try to pass. During the Jim Crow area, light-skinned
Blacks would try to pass as white to avoid the shame and stigma
associated with race and all the forms of discrimination associated
with race. Today people branded felons try to pass, not just by lying
to employers or housing officials, or failing to check the box on loan
applications, but by lying to their friends, family members and
co-workers, trying to hide their criminal status because of the shame
and stigma of having to admit, “Yeah, I did time, I was in prison for
5 years.” So this shame and stigma has created a real silence even in
the communities hardest hit by mass incarceration, one that makes
political action, collective political action to resist this new
system of control, extremely difficult if not impossible.

PA: In your subtitle you use the term “color-blindness.” I think a lot
of people want that word to be a positive word. You know, “If we’re
just color blind we can get past these problems.” Why do you think
that might be more harmful than positive?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Most people, it seems, now think that we as a
nation have finally triumphed over race, particularly since the
election of Barack Obama. There is a lot of talk about post-racialism
and how most Americans are now color blind. Much of my book reveals
that it isn’t the case that we are color blind. I argue that the goal
should not be color blindness, that the goal of colorblindness is
deeply misguided. It has the effect of making us blind not so much to
race, but to the existence of racial bias and severe racial
disparities and the suffering of people of other races. I argue that
rather than aspiring to be color blind, we should aspire to see and
appreciate people of all colors, recognize potential differences,
cultural differences, racial differences, to see each other as we are
but still care for one another.

The problem isn’t seeing race, it’s failing to care as much for people
of another race as we care for our own, and that, I believe, that
failure to care, the indifference to the experience of people of other
races, is what lies at the foundation of every caste system that has
ever existed in the United States or anywhere else in the world.
Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke frequently about this, particularly near
the end of his life, where he would remind audiences that slavery and
Jim Crow were not systems supported primarily by racial hostility or
open bigotry. Rather those systems emerged and endured because of so
much indifference, so much indifference by most to the plight of
people who were perceived as different, perceived as being
fundamentally different than themselves. Colorblindness really is our
enemy, and that we as a nation would be much better off if we openly
talked about race, openly acknowledged race, and really strove to care
more for people of other races.

PA: Finally, you hinted at the need for reinvigorating a reform
movement, a civil rights movement that really looks closely at these
issues. What do you see as drawbacks or problems with building that
movement, and what do you see as possibilities and hopeful signs for
building it?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Right now I think the biggest barriers to the
building of that movement are silence and denial. As I mentioned
earlier, there is a tremendous amount of silence about this system
even in the communities most impacted. I think the major exception is
in hip-hop music, which is one form of political expression that has
been consistently critical of the role of our criminal justice system
in poor communities of color. Hip-hop artists frequently express love,
care and concern for people who are behind bars and recognize that
their fathers, brothers, mothers, their loved ones, have been taken
away and often brutally mistreated by this system, but that they still
care and still feel deep connection to them, whether they have
committed a crime or not. But in general in our society there is
relatively little discussion about mass incarceration or the
devastation caused by the drug war in communities of color. That
silence absolutely has to be broken, and we must move out of denial.

I think one of the reasons we have been in such deep denial about the
existence of racial caste in America is because, on the surface, on
the shiny surface of things, it appears that we have made great
progress. Affirmative action has allowed for a handful of African
Americans to be sprinkled through elite universities and corporations
and government as well, and this has created a veneer, the appearance
of much more progress than has actually occurred, and masks the
severity of racial inequality in this country.

It is also the case that the erasure of prisoners from poverty
statistics and unemployment data also helps to mask the severity of
the problem. If you take into account prisoners, the standard rate of
black unemployment underestimates true black unemployment by as much
as 24 percentage points. Whatever you read in the newspaper as the
black unemployment rate today, you can add 15-20 percentage points to
that figure to account for all the black people warehoused in prisons.
Today the poverty rate and the unemployment rate is not better than it
was in 1968 when Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were assassinated
and cities across America lit up in flames. The unemployment rate is
actually worse today than it was back then, rivaling third-world
countries.

I think we have been in deep denial about the extent of racial
progress that has been made, and the silence amongst those hardest hit
has made it possible for us to ignore it. In building a movement I
think the first and most important thing that must be done is
consciousness-raising, truth-telling – and in the communities hardest
hit by mass incarceration by encouraging people to move beyond the
shame and stigma and break the silence, to do the healing that is
necessary to bring these communities shattered by the drug war
together, but also to have consciousness-raising among all those who
claim to care about social, economic and racial justice in the United
States. I find again and again that people like myself who have cared
about social and racial justice are stunned when they actually see the
data and learn how the US Supreme Court has granted license to law
enforcement to create this new racial under-caste. We need to know the
truth and break the silence, and then meaningful political action will
be possible.