Michelle Alexander’s Call to Conscience

Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, addressed a crowd of about 500 at Howard University’s Rankin Chapel in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, as part of the Chapel’s series on connecting personal values and ethics with professional life.

 
Her speech was at once inspiring, moving, and chilling. She recounted her journey from being seduced by the “big paycheck” of a corporate law firm to moving to a small civil rights firm and then to the ACLU’s racial justice project, where she worked on racial profiling, criminal justice, and police brutality issues.  
 
She then led the audience through her revelation about the depth and extent of the U.S. mass incarceration system, with a story about a young man who opened her mind to the pervasive mass incarceration system. She denied this man representation in a racial profiling case because he had been convicted of a drug crime, although he claimed innocence. He told her she was “no better than the police.” When she found out that he had in fact been framed and brutalized by the police, she was shaken, though not by her unwillingness to represent an innocent man, but her unwillingness to represent a convicted felon.

The formerly incarcerated are now denied the same basic rights that Jim Crow denied black people. We can’t legally discriminate on the basis of race, so the system doesn’t use race overtly, through the effect is the creation of an “undercaste.”  (Alexander labels the entrenched underclass produced by mass incarceration and disenfranchisement as a permanent “undercaste.”) The facts and analysis she presents in the book argue that mass incarceration is the New Jim Crow, a comparison she had previously dismissed as hyperbole. But the facts reveal the depth of the problem. More black men are involved in the criminal justice system today than were enslaved in 1850. Once a person is convicted of a felony, they are legally discriminated against and lose many basic rights including voting, jobs, housing, and public benefits, including food stamps.
 
In most cases these are non-violent, drug-related offenses, the “low-hanging fruit” of the Drug War. People are picked up through police policies including racial profiling that focus drug enforcement in poor communities of color despite the fact that the rates of drug sales and use are just as high, if not higher, in suburbs, white neighborhoods, and college campuses. The rate of incarceration is not related to the crime rate; in fact, the crime rate was low when Regan launched the War on Drugs and is currently on the decline while the prison population has quintupled in 30 years.

In a question from the audience about how these issues relate to immigrants involved in the criminal justice system, Ms. Alexander revealed that her next book project will focus on the criminalization of immigrants. There are some key parallels in the immigrant rights movement and the way certain immigrants are considered less-worthy of our advocacy or policy changes. We’ve seen the “good immigrant vs. bad immigrant” paradigm play out in immigrant rights rhetoric and the increasing scope of criminalization in immigrant communities, from the Criminal Alien Program and Secure Communities to Alabama’s HB 56 that target immigrants with criminal convictions and/or undocumented status.  

Through speeches like the one at Howard, Michelle Alexander is opening audiences’ eyes to the need for a revolution in the way we fundamentally think about imprisonment and justice:  the core belief that some people do not deserve dignity but sustained slavery and Jim Crow, and now undergirds our current mass incarceration system. As someone relatively new to the movement, I am inspired by Michelle Alexander’s challenge to align our personal values with our work and everything that we do. We must fight the many ways that people are stripped of their dignity by unjust laws and policies, and we must incorporate the fundamental principles of human rights and racial justice into the ways we do our work.