Alexander details the history of “racialized social control” (20). From slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration, she identifies a persistent pattern by which systems of racial subjugation are built, maintained, dismantled, and finally transformed to fit the circumstances of a given era. In the case of mass incarceration, politicians like Ronald Reagan built the system to fit into a new post-Civil Rights Movement paradigm that prohibited politicians from making overtly racist appeals to American voters. In this new era of supposed colorblindness, Reagan—and later George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton—utilized “law and order” (50) rhetoric that implicitly demonized Black men as predators. In the middle of Reagan’s presidency, crack cocaine swept through urban communities of color, giving “tough on crime” advocates the perfect pretext to launch an aggressive drug enforcement campaign against Black American males.
Alexander explains exactly how the new racial caste system works, beginning with its point of entry: the police. Empowered by Supreme Court decisions that effectively gutted the Fourth Amendment, police officers may stop and search individuals under the faintest pretexts of probable cause. Yet just because police departments can target millions of Americans suspected of possessing small amounts of drugs, the question remains of why they choose to divert time and resources away from addressing more serious crimes like murders and rapes. Alexander points to huge financial incentives offered by the federal government to encourage widespread enforcement of minor drug infractions. Massive federal cash grants and changes to civil asset forfeiture laws have made participation in the drug war extraordinarily lucrative for state and local police departments.
In the following chapter Alexander explores why, in many states, Black Americans make up as much as 80% to 90% of individuals who serve time in prison on drug charges, even though the system is formally colorblind and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates. Unlike in the case of robberies or assaults, where clear victims exist, those involved with drug transactions are unlikely to report them to the police because doing so would implicate themselves in a crime. As a result, police must be proactive in addressing drug crime and are therefore afforded an enormous amount of discretion concerning whom to target. As for why police departments choose to disproportionately target people of color, Alexander blames both implicit biases and pervasive media and political campaigns that frame Black men as criminals in the American imagination. Prosecutors are also granted an outsized amount of discretion thanks to the introduction of mandatory minimum sentences for drug criminals. With such harsh sentences hanging over the heads of those charged with drug crimes, prosecutors are better empowered to extract plea deals. While these plea deals may keep an individual out of jail, they also frequently result in a felony record, saddling that person for life with what Alexander calls “the prison label” (189). The consequences of this prison label are the focus of Chapter 4. When an individual leaves prison or accepts a felony plea deal, they face legal discrimination in employment, housing, welfare benefits, and often voting rights. It is here that Alexander observes the strongest similarities between mass incarceration and the Jim Crow era, given that Black Americans faced these same forms of discrimination during the first half of the 20th century in the South. She also addresses the stigma felt by everyone touched by the criminal justice system, which includes the formerly incarcerated, their families, and any individual who can expect daily harassment from police officers. The following chapter outlines the specific similarities and differences between Jim Crow and mass incarceration. Aside from the legal discrimination in both systems, Jim Crow and mass incarceration have similar political roots. Both systems gained political support from elites who sought to exploit the economic and cultural fears of poor and working-class whites. Both operate by defining what it means to be Black in America in the cultural imagination—in the case of mass incarceration, that means defining Black men as criminals. Perhaps the most significant and frightening difference is that while both slavery and Jim Crow were systems of labor exploitation, mass incarceration involves marginalization and removal from society. Alexander points out that similar racially based marginalization efforts were precursors to genocides in the 20th century.