Blog: New Jim Crow Mini-Review & Commentary (Link)
The New Jim Crow: Mini-Review and Commentary
The simple truth is that even now, more than eight years after its publication, Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness“ remains the single most important book written about the US prison industrial complex and how it targets African American men.
There’s a reason why this book is making its way on to (and off of) the banned list in a number of US prisons and I’m personally of the opinion that Alexander’s writting should be required reading for prosecutors, police and correctional officers in the United States. When you can still describe a book about the ever-changing American “justice” system as “timely, relevant and revolutionary” as it approaches its first decade of existence, it’s fair to say you’ve got an earth-shattering work on your hands.
At first, I was a little bit leery of buying/reading this book because Alexander herself has extensive ties to what most of us would call the mainstream neoliberal establishment – she’s clerked for federal court judges, she’s a graduate of Stanford Law and The New Jim Crow was written with the help of a Soros Justice Fellowship through the Open Society Foundation. Furthermore, the release of her book created a significant amount of buzz in mainstream liberal circles with precisely the kind of people you and I both know don’t care about justice, mass incarceration, prison slavery or the plight of targeted African American men in urban areas militarily occupied by the police.
Thankfully however, once I actually started reading The New Jim Crow I was in for a welcome surprise. Alexander writes like someone who not only knows how to talk the talk, but also walk the walk. Her passion, outrage and brutal honesty about racist mass incarceration in the United States screams off the page, chapter by chapter. Furthermore, Alexander’s research, documentation and examples of the US justice system in action leave little room for anecdotal opining about “a few bad apples” and personal experiences. If you don’t walk away from reading this book with the sense that mass incarceration is racist, outrageously immoral and a way to continue the economic benefits of slavery for rich investors in the private prison industry – it’s because you’d already decided the answer before you started reading. Alexander’s case is air tight, and her writing is fierce – perhaps that’s why most mainstream liberals who praise The New Jim Crow don’t seem to have actually read it.
What really impresses me about Alexander’s work however is her broad understanding of the psychology of a society that continues to allow these types of abuses and indeed, the establishment of a caste system that marks “offenders” as “exploitable” long after they’ve left the people for profit warehouses of the prison system. In the above quote, the author describes the desensitized mindset necessary to continue mass incarceration for profit and the lifelong exploitation of the “prisoner” class as “knowing and not knowing” – in my own writing, I’ve often spoken of these mental gymnastics as “knowing, but not living the truth.”
The simplicity of this idea however disguises the true power of understanding it because when you get down to brass tacks, all of us are wandering around “knowing”, “not knowing” and definitely “not living” a truly staggering number of horrible truths in our society. We “know and don’t know” that our government is assassinating innocent people with drones. We “know” and yet rarely acknowledge that austerity and neoliberalism are literally killing people. We “know” and yet do not live the reality that globalized, deregulated capitalism is threatening to wipe out most life on Earth as we speak. Frankly, I could keep going – how long have we known that a truly staggering number of powerful people connected to the US government are friends with and likely protected serial teen rapist Jeff Epstein? How often do you really think about Epstein or what his story might mean in relation to our establishment at large?
This disconnect between “knowing” and “addressing” these horrific realities goes a long way towards explaining why otherwise good people have stood aside as the predatory and powerful ruling class have rolled back our rights and turned many of us into debt slaves trapped in endless cycles of poverty. The fact that Alexander’s work speaks to a much wider world than mass incarceration and begins to challenge the very thinking that allows exploitation on the level required to maintain the prison industrial complex, makes this book a rare value and a must read.
– nina illingworth
