$
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."