PDF Summary:The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander

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• Racism is built into the constitution - slaves are defined as ⅗ of a man. Federalism protects states’ rights to slavery.

3) They collapse resistance across the political spectrum, largely by appealing to the vulnerability of lower-class whites.

• The planter class extends special privileges to poor whites to distinguish them from black slaves. Privileges include greater access to Native American lands and allowing policing of slaves.

4) The system becomes institutionalized and pervasive, as stakeholders pursue their own incentives and rationalize their behavior.

• Due to the “racial bribes,” poor whites now have a personal stake in the maintenance of a race-based system of slavery.
• The planter elites obviously have deep incentives to maintain slavery to enjoy their low labor costs.
• White supremacy becomes a religion of sorts - “whites are superior to blacks, and slavery is for the blacks’ own goods.” Cognitive dissonance reinforces these beliefs - “if I’m a slave owner, and yet I also believe in American liberty, then African inferiority must be true.”

Jim Crow and Racial Segregation

1) White elites committed to racial hierarchy worry about a...

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• Allowing discretionary arrests for fine-only misdemeanors because requiring police to know details of penalty schemes on the spot was unreasonable.
• Allowing use of drug-courier profiles in justifying searches. There are no national standards for profiles, and they can be so vague as to be generally applicable.

Police Searches Increase

Empowered by this latitude, police conducted more liberal searches.

• Consent searches pressure people to comply, despite people not knowing they could refuse.
  • “May I speak to you? Will you put your arms up and stand against the wall for a search?” Compliance is interpreted as consent.
• “Pretext stops” use minor traffic violations as a pretext to search for drugs, despite no evidence that drug laws are being violated.
  • Argument: There are so many minor laws that are commonly broken that virtually everyone can be stopped as pretext for drug searches.
• Bringing drug-sniffing dogs to traffic stops or in public gives probable cause to search without consent.
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What, then, is to blame? Alexander argues it’s primarily granting discretion for law enforcement in who to arrest, fueled by conscious and unconscious racial bias.

Racial Biases in Arrests

Drug enforcement faces some oddities in prosecution, compared to other crimes: 1) drug use is consensual, and so unlike robberies or murders, drug crime is not usually reported, 2) drug use is widespread, and law enforcement can’t possibly identify and detain every drug criminal, for reasons of resource constraints and politics.

So the criminal justice system faces a question - if we are to wage this war, how can we get the most success? And given that incentives push toward number of arrests and convictions, how do we maximize these metrics?

The answer, it seems, was to use the flexibility of discretion in ways that heavily disadvantaged black people.

A combination of social, media, legal, and police forces combined to produce heavy racial baises.

Media Biases

The media supported the idea of crack being the predominant drug problem, and the imagery associated crack with black people. So a public consensus formed that drug criminals were predominantly black.

This...

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Employment Penalties

Criminals are already disadvantaged in finding employment, with most dropping out of high school and being illiterate.

40 states require parolees to maintain employment, or possibly be sent back to prison. But almost all states allow private employers to discriminate on past criminal convictions or arrests. Licensing for some professions prohibits felons.

The professions that are less customer facing and most willing to hire felons - construction, manufacturing - are disappearing due to outsourcing.

Felons may have their driver’s licenses expired or suspended, which exacerbates the job search and depletes the number of reasonably accessible jobs. They might spend more money getting to work than they earn.

Over 33% of young black men in the US are unemployed; 65% of young black male dropouts are unemployed.

• Keep in mind poverty and unemployment statistics usually don’t include incarcerated people, so the true jobless rates may be underestimating by 20%.

Ironically, activism to remove questions about criminal history from job...

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Here are less obvious parallels to Jim Crow:

• Racial segregation
  • During Jim Crow, segregation compartmentalized black experience from whites, making it easier to maintain racial stereotypes and deny suffering.
    • Some historians argue concentration of blacks in urban neighborhoods is a consequence of deliberate government policies meant to perpetuate segregation.
  • Mass incarceration does the same, stuffing black men in prisons out of sight, even further away than Jim Crow segregation did.
  • Prisoners returning home concentrate further in poor neighborhoods, which have limited resources.
• Symbolic production of race
  • Slavery defined being black as being a slave. Jim Crow defined being black as being a second-class citizen. Mass incarceration defines being black as being criminal.
  • Experiment: react to this statement: “we really need to do something about the problem of white crime.” If this sounds a little odd to you, reflect on how natural “black crime” sounds.
  • What it means to be a criminal has...

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• Phone companies that charge families high rates to call in; gun manufacturers for police; stakeholders of builders of new prisons in white rural communities all have skin in the game.

Data seem to suggest the lowest crime rates in history.

• However, some suggest imprisonment creates far more crime than it prevents, and we could have even less crime today.

People are increasingly loath to talk about race and fearful of violating racial etiquette.

• People want colorblindness for different reasons. Conservatives believe in individualism and the idea that race is a private matter. Liberals believe in racial equality and the unloading of significance on race. Others prefer colorblindness because it seems that the only practical way to accept racial differences is to not see them.
• This has entrenched an insistence that systems are colorblind and just, and personal responsibility and morals are to blame for arrests. If we are colorblind, we ignore inherent real racial biases and racial divisions.
• Alexander argues people must recognize race and show care for others, fully cognizant of possible racial differences. Seeing race is not the problem; refusing to care...

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• Concentrated police action in black ghettos makes further concentration more likely, since whites don’t want police intervention in their neighborhoods and ex-offenders return to their neighborhoods.
• The psychology of being a victim presents more probable cause reasons for non-racial targeting, like appearing nervous around police or running away. Thus, stories about black people being arrested may make black people even more fearful, and thus more likely to be arrested.
• As a defensive mechanism, embracing the stigma of criminalism as gangsta love is self-destructive and leads to more criminalism, which further reinforces cultural acceptance of criminalism.

When powerful positive feedback loops are at play, strong interventions (like affirmative action or social programs) can perturb the system and disrupt the feedback loop.

• For instance, having more black prosecutors and police officers may allow more empathy for black offenders that white offenders have enjoyed (the point above about how a drug user can be seen either as a criminal or as a wayward youth who fell off the path).
• However, Alexander is skeptical of the power of single interventions like...