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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 18, 2011)
$ Lawyer and author M ichelle Alexander says we need a social movement to change the crim inal justice system B Y ROSETTE ROYALE C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R TT m agine you could a rre st every single p erson in I Houston, Texas, and toss them behind bars. A Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But maybe, in some senses something similar has already happened. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, nearly 2.3 million people exist in prisons and jails. That’s how many people live in Houston, the country’s fourth-largest city. Nearly BO percent of those locked up were nabbed fqr drug related crimes. Of the more than two million who are incarcerated, 38 percent are black; in 20 states, the number of black people behind bars far exceeds the number who aren’t. And these figures don’t include people on probation or parole. What, you might be inclined to ask, is going on here? Mjchelle Alexander, a lawyer who directed the ACLU’s Racial Justice Project of Northern California, set out to get some answers to this question. What she found distressed her. Our country’s mass incarceration has come as a direct result of polices that target poor people of color, policies that have national precedent The evidence to support her claims fills the pages of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” (The New Press, $27.95), à sobering look at how we’ve become the nation with more people incarcerated than any other. In town to give a number of talks sponsored by the Bush School's Diversity Speaker Series, Alexander, currently an Associate Law Professor at Ohio State University, sat down at Mount Zion Baptist Church to discuss what she’s learned. She spoke not only of how and why these inequities arose, but how, ip an unexpected twist, her early belief in the criminal justice system may have contributed to the problem. R o s e tt e R oyale: So you wrote a book called “The New Jim, Crow.” First, let’s start with the old Jim Crow. What’s that? M ichelle A lexander: Well, the old Jim Crow is a systern of rules, laws, policies and customs that served to lock a group of people defined by race into a permanent second-class status. Jim Crow laws authorized discrimination in virtually evéfy aspect of social, political and economic life. Most - people think of Jim Crow as separate schools for black children and white, but of course Jim Crow laws also authorized discrimination in access to employment, housing, éducation, all sorts of public benefits, all sorts qf public accommodations. It creatéd a race-based regime of social control. 1 f A R.R.: And the name Jim Crow; Where does that evert come from? M.A.: Actually, it came from a song-anddance routine and the character was named Jim Grow. It was a minstrelshow that was mocking of African Americans and celebrated the worst racial stereotypes that justified discrimination during that era. So Jim Crow was a pejorative term that _ came to be associated with all those forms of race discrimination. R.R.: So that was the old. And now, it seems we’re in the new. How do you define the new Jim Crow? M A : The new Jim Crow is a system of mass incarceration that serves to sweep millions of poor people, primarily poor people of color, into a SEE LOCK AND KEY, page 10 Inside Life a fte r 100 years a fte r foreclosure 1,000 homeless Good Grief America founder Nancie Koerber talks about the ? < movement to emjfbwer foreclosure victims men Page 4 I A Chicago social worker’s journal on how quickly fate can turn Page 8 P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F O H IO ST A T E U N IV E R S IT Y Michelle Alexander Ä T i "W ithin a few short decades, this vast, new nnder-caste emerged that swept m illions of folks for prim arily non-violent and drug-related offenses, the same types of crimes that occur with roughly equal frequency in m iddle class communities, on college campuses and universities that get ignored. Millions of folks."
