The Enduring Career of Jim Crow

On June 15, 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama stepped to the podium of the predominantly black Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, Illinois, to give a Father's Day address.

His message was a familiar one. "Too many fathers are missing," he said, "missing from too many lives and too many homes . . . They have abandoned their responsibilities. They're acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it. You and I know this is true everywhere, but nowhere is this more true than in the African American community." (Alexander, pp. 178-179)

"The media did not ask -- and Obama did not tell -- where the missing fathers might be found." (Alexander, p. 179)

In December 2006, echoing a common refrain of black women seeking life partners, Ebony magazine ran an article entitled "Where Have the Black Men Gone?" The question was not merely rhetorical. "In 2002 the U.S. Census Bureau reported that there were nearly three million more black adult women than men in black communities across the United States, a gender gap of twenty-six percent," three times higher than the disparity for whites. (Alexander, p. 179)

In her devastating 2012 expose, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Ohio State law professor Michelle Alexander not only provides the chilling answer, she crafts a searing and sobering indictment against a racially unbalanced criminal justice system which has produced a deluge of disturbing statistics.

From 1980 to 2008, the United States penal population exploded from five hundred thousand to more than two million, while its general population grew only thirty-three percent. One out of every one hundred adult Americans is currently behind bars compared to one out of every four hundred in 1970. The U. S. incarceration rate -- the highest in the world -- exceeds that of Germany by a factor of eight, and dwarfs that of nearly every developed country, including the highly repressive regimes in Russia, China, and Iran. With five percent of the world's population, the U. S. accounts for twenty-three percent of its prisoners. (Alexander, p. 6)

Between 1960 and 1990, official crime rates in Finland, Germany, and the United States were almost identical. Yet the U. S. incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate declined sixty per cent, and the German rate was unchanged. As Michael Toury explains in Thinking About Crime: "Governments decide how much punishment they want, and these decisions are in no simple way related to crime rates." (Alexander, p. 7)

In the mid-seventies, U. S. criminologists were actually predicting the demise of the prison system. Prison did not deter crime significantly, they said, because people with meaningful social and economic opportunities were not inclined to breaking the law, while ex-prisoners were likely recidivists. In 1973, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals recommended that "no new institutions for adults should be built and existing institutions for juveniles should be closed." Its research concluded that "the prison, the reformatory, and the jail have achieved only a shocking record of failure. There is overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it." (Alexander, p. 8)

Reformers who believed that even 350,000 imprisoned were too many announced a national campaign to end prison constructions. "Supporters of the moratorium can be forgiven for being so naive," says Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, "since the prison expansion that was about to take place was unprecedented in human history." (Alexander, pp. 8-9)

"The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature. No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities" -- not even South Africa at the height of apartheid. (Alexander, p. 6)

In 2010, almost 2,100,000 males (and 200,000 females) were incarcerated in U. S., state, and local prisons, of whom 40 percent were black (over 900,000), 20 percent Hispanic (about 460,000), and the remainder white. Since, according to that year's census, blacks comprised only 12.6 percent of the general population (and Hispanics 16.4 percent), the disproportion is dramatic.

The figures are even more shocking when considers the rate of black males incarcerated -- 4,347 per 100,000 -- compared to the rate of white males -- 678 per 100,000 -- or the percent of the black male population in prison, five, compared to the percent of white males, seven-tenths. One in three black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine is under criminal justice supervision on any given day, and the same percentage can expect to spend some time behind bars during their lifetime; in Washington, D.C., that number soars to a staggering three out of four. (Alexander, p. 6)

"More African American adults are under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850." The mass incarceration of blacks is one reason that a black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than one born into slavery. "The absence of black fathers from families is not simply a function of laziness, immaturity, or watching too much Sports Center," but also of the criminal justice system, which has swallowed up thousands of them. (Alexander, p. 180)

At year end 2009, almost five million adults were on probation or parole. Of those for whom their race is known or reported, about thirty percent are black. Although technically free, these convicted felons, by virtue of their criminal records, are entangled in a web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that controls them as thoroughly as if they were still in confinement, banishes them to the fringes of civil society, denies them access to the mainstream economy, and effectively consigns them to a state of second-class citizenship. (Alexander, p. 13)

According to the American Bar Association, an ex-offender "may be ineligible for many federally-funded health and welfare benefits, food stamps, public housing, and federal educational assistance. His driver's license may be automatically suspended, and he may no longer qualify for certain employment and professional licenses . . . He will not be permitted to enlist in the military, possess a firearm, or obtain a federal security clearance. If a citizen, he may lose the right to vote; if not, he becomes immediately deportable." (Alexander, p.143) If he is black, his wages will grow twenty percent slower than those of his white counterparts.

One might reasonably conclude that the rise in incarceration over the past three decades reflects a commensurate rise in crime. In fact, according to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the total number of violent crimes in 2008 was only about three percent higher than it was in 1980, and the rate was actually lower, nineteen per one thousand people in 2008 compared to forty-nine per thousand in 1980.

The single greatest factor behind the meteoric growth in the U. S. prison population since 1980 has been the national War on Drugs, officially launched in October 1982 by President Ronald Reagan. Its relentless campaign to criminalize marijuana and cocaine users and dealers has been exacerbated by the mandatory minimum sentencing and three strikes laws enacted in the 1980's and 1990's, which require state courts to impose extended periods of incarceration to persons convicted of felonies on three or more separate occasions.

"Drug offenses alone account for two-thirds of the rise in the federal inmate population and more than half of the state increase between 1985 and 2000. Approximately half a million people are in prison for a drug offense today, compared to an estimated 41,000 in 1980." Drug arrests have tripled from ten million to thirty-one million since the war began. "There are more people in prisons and jails today just for drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980." (Alexander, p. 60)

Five times as many whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet the latter are sent to prison for drug offenses at ten times the rate of the former. African Americans represent twelve percent of the total population of drug users, yet thirty-eight percent of those arrested and fifty-nine percent of those incarcerated in state prisons for drug offenses. African Americans serve about as much time in prison on drug charges (58.7 months) as whites do for violent crime (61.7 months).

Professor Alexander's thesis is that the contemporary marginalization of black males by means of a misguided and discriminatory drug war is merely the third iteration of a deeply-entrenched racial caste system that originated with the institutionalization of chattel slavery in the eighteenth century and was perpetuated in form of Jim Crow segregation in the late twentieth century. Each hierarchical edifice was constructed upon the same foundation -- the racial fears and economic vulnerability of lower-class whites, "a group which is understandably eager to ensure that it never finds itself trapped at the bottom of the American social order." (Alexander, p. 22)

Citing research by noted historians Lerone Bennett Jr. and Edmund Morgan, Alexander contends that a burgeoning demand for cheap labor for its cotton and tobacco plantations impelled the colonial aristocracy to transition from the employment of indentured servants, both black and white, to the enslavement of Africans.

In 1679, Nathaniel Bacon, a white property owner in Jamestown, Virginia, "managed to unite slaves, indentured servants, and poor whites in a revolutionary effort to overthrow the planter elite." Initially a scheme to seize more Indian land for himself, Bacon turned against the planters when they refused him militia support. (Alexander, p. 24)

The confederation of black and white bondsmen alarmed the planters. After suppressing the rebellion, to protect their status and economic position, they abandoned their heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of importing more black slaves. In addition, they extended special prerogatives to poor whites in order to discourage any future fraternization -- granting them large portions of Indian territory, allowing them to oversee and police slaves, and eliminating competition between free and slave labor. Poor whites now had a vested interest in sustaining their racially privileged position. (Alexander, pp. 24-25)

To reconcile chattel slavery with the new nation's ideals of liberty and equality, Africans were deemed an uncivilized lesser race lacking intelligence and laudable human qualities and relegated to a bestial status even lower than that of the red-skinned native Americans.

The degradation of the black man did not end with Emancipation or Reconstruction. But whereas, under slavery, the racial order had been most effectively maintained by close contact between owners and subjects -- which maximized supervision and discipline -- ensuring a low-paid, submissive labor force in the post-bellum period would mandate a comprehensive and repressive segregated society. (Alexander, pp. 27-30)

The normalization of such a system followed a familiar pattern. The advent of the Populist Movement in the late nineteenth century -- which denounced large corporations and the wealthy as enemies of the poor -- seemed to augur a new era in race relations. "Populists preached an 'equalitarianism of want and poverty, the kinship of a common grievance and a common oppressor,' " and a class-based unity which embraced racial integration. As C. Vann Woodward wrote in his authoritative study, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, "It is altogether probable that during the brief Populist upheaval . . . Negroes and native whites achieved a greater comity of mind and harmony of political purpose than ever before or since in the South." (Alexander, p. 33)

Once again an alliance between poor and working class whites and African Americans aroused fear in the hearts of southern conservative elites. In order to drive a wedge between the two groups and counter the hostility being directed toward them, raising the cry of white supremacy, they threw up a wall of discriminatory legal and extra-legal practices designed to foster lower-class whites' sense of superiority and to discourage them from joining forces with their inferiors. (Alexander, pp. 33-34)

With their partnership under siege and their political viability in jeopardy, the Populists discarded their black-skinned comrades, as did Northern liberals desiring to reconcile with the South and Southern moderates who had formerly promised to protect blacks from racial extremism. (Alexander, p. 34)

"By the turn of the twentieth century, every state in the South had laws on the books that disenfranchised blacks, discriminated against them in virtually every sphere of life, and sanctioned a racial ostracism encompassing schools, churches, housing, jobs, restrooms, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, orphanages, prisons, funeral homes, morgues, and cemeteries." Jim Crow segregation -- and permission to hate and scapegoat blacks -- was a fait accompli. (Alexander, p. 350)

It died a slow death.

World War II highlighted a blatant and embarrassing contradiction between America's international fight against the Nazis and its tolerance of a domestic racial caste system. Subsequently, the NAACP began to challenge Jim Crow laws in federal courts. In a series of cases beginning in 1944, the U. S. Supreme Court struck down all-white primary elections, segregated interstate buses, racially discriminatory real estate agreements, and segregated law schools in Texas and Oklahoma. In 1954, in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Court not only declared that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, by implication it undermined the rationale of legal discrimination in the South. (Alexander, p. 36)

Progress stalled, ground to a halt by Massive Resistance and intimidating violence. Only a widespread, grassroots Civil Rights Movement -- boycotts, marches, and sit-ins organized and conducted by courageous activists immune to bombings, beatings, and arrests -- could crack the monolith. "The Civil Rights Bill of 1964 formally dismantled the system of Jim Crow discrimination in public accommodations, employment, voting, education, and federally financed activities." The Voting Rights Bill of 1965 removed numerous barriers to political participation by African Americans and mandated federal review of all new voting regulations. (Alexander, pp. 37-38)

At the peak of the Movement, Civil Rights leaders, recognizing that poverty was as crippling a social problem as racism, sought to align their goals with those of poor and working class whites, who were also demanding reforms. The result was a Poor People's Movement, a multiracial coalition addressing poverty across all color lines, nothing less than a "populist crusade calling for redistribution of economic and political power." (Alexander, p. 39)

"With the success of the Civil Rights Movement and the launching of the Poor People's Movement, it was apparent that a major disruption in the nation's racial equilibrium had occurred . . . Conservative whites began to search for a new racial order that would conform to the the needs and constraints of the time . . . one that would have to be race-neutral, that is, avoid explicit or clearly intentional race discrimination." That order would be defined by the race-neutral language of "law and order." (Alexander, pp. 39-40)

The direct-action tactics employed by civil rights activists in the years following Brown v. Board of Education were often characterized by local and state Southern officials as criminal and indicative of a breakdown in law and order. Rising U. S. crime rates between 1960 and 1970 -- driven by a population spike in the fifteen to twenty-four year old age group and higher unemployment among black men -- coupled with the riots that swept the nation after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 fueled the argument that civil rights for blacks led to rampant crime. (Alexander, pp. 41-42)

The rhetoric of law and order proved highly effective, particularly in the South, in appealing to poor and working class whites who were opposed to integration and resented the gains of African Americans, with whom they now had to compete for jobs and status. Disenchanted by the Democratic Party's apparent support for liberal causes, many were enticed into an incongruous alliance with staunchly Republican corporate and high-income constituencies. (Alexander, p. 46)

"By 1968, eighty-one per cent of those responding to a Gallup Poll agreed that 'law and order had broken down in this country,' and the majority blamed 'Negroes who start riots' and 'Communists.' " That same year both Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon and independent George Wallace made 'law and order' a central theme of their campaigns, and together garnered fifty-seven percent of the vote. (Alexander, p. 46)

At the heart of this new type of politics was "white racism and the self-fueling fear bred by it . . . The fear of crime became all-American; law and order emerged as the new political currency with which to unite white voters of disparate classes." Shortly before his victory in 1968, Nixon noted the power of anti-crime fearmongering and its racial content in a letter to President Eisenhower: "I have found great audience response to this theme in all parts of the country, including areas like New Hampshire where there is virtually no race problem and relatively little crime." (Parenti, p. 7)

Nixon's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, would later write in his diary that Nixon "emphasized that the whole problem [of leftist activism and anti-Vietnam War protests] is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to." That system would be the war on crime. (Parenti, p. 12)

"Just as race had been used at the turn of the century by Southern elites to rupture class solidarity at the bottom of the income level, race as a national issue broke up the Democratic New Deal 'bottom-up' coalition" of white and black voters at or below the median income. (Alexander, p. 47)

In 1980 Ronald Reagan rode into the presidency on the backs of disaffected whites. While ostensibly colorblind, his repeated attacks on "criminal predators" and "welfare queens" and his unabashed promotion of states' rights were tinged with racial hues -- and usually accompanied by vehement promises to be tougher on crime and to enhance the federal government's role in combating it. (Alexander, p. 49)

He soon fulfilled his pledge to crack down on the racially defined "others" -- the undeserving. In October 1982 he officially announced his administration's War on Drugs. At the time, less than two percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation -- hardly a deterrent since the war's victims, the minority underclass, were its true targets, rather than the product itself. Between 1981 and 1991, anti-drug spending by the Drug Enforcement Agency, the FBI, and the Department of Defense soared from one hundred sixty million dollars to one billion two hundred fifty million dollars. (Alexander, p. 49)

The campaign could not have come at a worse time. The blue-collar factory jobs that had once been plentiful in urban areas had been disappearing since the early seventies -- shipped overseas where labor costs were cheaper. Unable to adapt to the technological changes revolutionizing the workplace and lacking mobility and transportation to the suburbs where innovative or service companies might be hiring, inner city black men found themselves unemployable. Selling drugs -- particularly crack cocaine, which hit the streets in 1985, a few years after Reagan's war declaration -- became one of the few ways to earn money. It was a perfect storm. (Alexander, p. 51)

The Radical Left would argue a contrarian cause-and-effect -- that the rising numbers of impoverished low-wage workers and unemployed youth posed a challenge to the established economic, social, and racial order, a political threat that demanded defensive containment and active stabilization. In their view, the War on Drugs was implemented as a deliberate mechanism to undermine, discredit, demoralize, demonize, and ultimately incarcerate this potentially rebellious class, or more accurately, caste, as the majority were increasingly people of color. (Parenti, p. 46)

Faced with increasing rates of drug abuse and addiction, the U. S. government could have chosen the paths of treatment, education, prevention, and investment in crime-ridden communities. Instead, it chose war, and leaped at the opportunity to publicize the evils of crack cocaine.

In June 1986, Newsweek elevated crack to the biggest story since Vietnam/Watergate; in August, Time declared it "the issue of the year." Thousands of stories about the drug scourge flooded the airwaves and newsstands -- seventy-four on the three major networks in July alone, 1565 in the Washington Post between October 1988 and October 1989. Their content focused on black crack whores, crack babies, and gangbangers, and reinforced prevalent stereotypes of black men and women as comprising a criminal, inferior, and irresponsible subculture. (Alexander, p. 52)

Lawmakers eager to reap the political benefits soon joined the fray. Legislation in 1986 allocated two billion dollars to the crusade, including a massive infusion of cash earmarked for new prison construction, enlisted the military in narcotics control, permitted the death penalty for certain drug-related crimes, and imposed a mandatory minimum sentence for the distribution of crack cocaine which was far more severe than the one for distributing an equal amount of powder cocaine. (Alexander, p. 53)

Few voices were heard in opposition. One senator insisted that crack had become a scapegoat distracting attention from the true causes of society's problems "If we blame crime on crack," he argued, "our politicians are off the hook. Forgotten are the failed schools, the malign welfare programs, the desolate neighborhoods, the wasted years. Only crack is to blame. One is tempted to think that if crack did not exist, someone would have received a federal grant to invent." (Alexander, p. 53)

Two years later the Anti-Drug Abuse Act authorized the eviction from public housing of tenants who allowed criminal drug activity to be conducted on the premises, denied many public benefits, including student loans, to convicted drug offenders, and prescribed a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for simple possession of cocaine base, with no intent to sell. (Alexander, p. 53)

"The results were immediate. As law enforcements budgets exploded, so did prison populations. In 1991, the Sentencing Project reported that the number of people incarcerated in the United States was unprecedented in world history, and that one-fourth of young African American men were under the control of the criminal justice system." (Alexander, p. 56)

Between 1980 and 1990, while the African American component of the nation's population remained stable at twelve percent, its representation among all those arrested on drug charges nearly doubled from twenty-three to forty percent, and rose to sixty percent among all those convicted of narcotics violations. (Parenti, p. 57)

Bill Clinton was determined that no Republican would be perceived as tougher on crime than he. His 1994 bill created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders, and committed more than sixteen billion dollars to state prisons and to the expansion of state and local police forces. His welfare reform act banned convicted drug felons from being eligible for food stamps and welfare. He made it easier for federally-funded public housing projects to exclude anyone with a criminal history. (Alexander, pp. 56-57)

Clinton once boasted that his Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program, which put tens of thousands of new officers on the streets, was responsible for the dramatic fifteen-year drop in violent crime which began in the 1990's. But a 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office concluded that, at best, it it may have been responsible for one per cent of that reduction -- at a cost of $8 billion. (Alexander, p. 253)

Even Barack Obama has disappointed racial justice advocates who greeted his inauguration with enthusiasm and the expectation that it portended meaningful reform. Such selections as Vice-President Joe Biden, one of the Senate's most strident drug warriors, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a major proponent of drug war expansion during the Clinton Administration, and Attorney-General Eric Holder, who espoused harsh mandatory minimums in his former position as U. S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, signaled that little relief was on the horizon. (Alexander, p. 252)

Obama not only revived Clinton's COPS program, he increased grant allocations twelvefold to state and local authorities to fund law enforcement training, SWAT teams, narcotic task forces, and highway interdiction. These measures were part of the 2009 stimulus package, a calculated strategy to save or create jobs during the economic crisis, but at a cost, according to New York Times columnist Charles Blow, of "ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic men and, by extension, the communities they belong to." (Alexander, p. 253)

"At the turn of the twenty-first century, more than two million people found themselves behind bars; millions more were relegated to the margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space . . . where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education was perfectly legal and where they could be denied the right to vote." The racial composition of this community of outcasts was grossly disproportionate to its percentage of the general population. (Alexander, p. 58)

The rumors of its demise having been greatly exaggerated, the strange career of Jim Crow was proving to be as enduring as a Mark Twain aphorism.

REFERENCES

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2012.

Parenti, Christian. Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis. New York: Verso, 1999.