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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander. New York, NY: The New Press, 2010. 290pp. $27.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781595581037.
In The New Jim Crow, civil rights lawyer and Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander examines the legal and social framework that supports the regime of mass incarceration of black men in the United States. As Alexander carefully recounts, beginning in the early 1980s with President Reagan's declaration of a "War on Drugs," a number of poticy initiatives, Supreme Court decisions, and vested interests, aided and abetted by political divisiveness and pubtic apathy, coalesced to create the social, legal, and political environment that has supported mass incarceration ever since. Alexander's analysis reveals disturbing parallels between the racial caste systems of slavery, Jim Crow, and today's mass incarceration of black men in our country. In the end, however, Alexander shies away from proposing a potentially successful strategy for redressing the dilemma she so carefully depicts. Rather, she "punts," or "cops out," as we would have said in earlier eras.
Alexander begins her analysis with a brief history of the several hundred years of variously oppressive race relations between whites and blacks in the United States. Quite correctly, Alexander observes that this history may be f ruitfully understood as a sequence of renascent forms of social control refashioned to the new tenor of the times. Thus, Alexander traces the history of American political rhetoric in the latter hati of the twentieth century where "law and order" comes to constitute code for "the race problem" and a policy of matign neglect toward African Americans is transmuted into an active political strategy devised to develop Republican political dominance in the southern states. Ultimately, as we know, the twin themes of crime and welfare propelled Ronald Reagan into the presidency. Searching for a f ollow-up initiative to define his early presidency, Reagan settled on increased attention to street crune, especially drug law enforcement. In short, the War on Drugs was not some disembodied social agenda, nor was it driven by public demand, as only two percent of Americans...