The Prison System is the New Jim Crow.
OSU law professor Michelle Alexander saw those words sprawled across a bright-orange flier on a telephone pole 10 years ago in Oakland, Calif.
Yes, the criminal justice system is biased, Alexander remembered thinking. But she said she found it counter-productive to link the prison system to the pernicious Jim Crow segregation of the pre-civil rights movement.
She was headed to her job at the Racial Justice Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. And after a year working there on issues such as police brutality, racial profiling and disproportionate sentencing, she came to a different conclusion.
The criminal justice system in the U.S. is not a fundamentally just institution infected with an unfortunate racial bias, she now argues, but “a different beast entirely.”
She has chronicled the past, present and what she believes might be the future of mass incarceration in a critically acclaimed and controversial book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” published in January.
Among the stark findings she presents are numbers that show how mass incarceration, fueled by the war on drugs, has disproportionately affected African-Americans.
It’s no secret that the United States’ prison system is the most robust in the world.
In 2008, the year of President Obama’s historic election, the U.S. imprisoned about 2.3 million people, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies at King’s College in London.
China, with an authoritarian regime and about four times the population, imprisoned about 1.5 million, a distant second.
The population of state prisons did decline last year, the first time in nearly 40 years, according to the Pew Center on the States, but numbers vary widely from state to state, and numbers in the federal system continued to climb.
Black adults are four times as likely as whites to be under correctional control — in prison, on parole or probation — according to a report released by the center in 2008. It showed that one in 11 blacks were under correctional control compared to one in 45 whites.
Alexander said she knows that her linking of mass incarceration to forms of racial control such as slavery and widespread discrimination in the South might be difficult for some people to swallow. And she said she empathizes with them, saying she once shared the same misgivings.
“But the reality is that our prison population has quintupled in the last three decades,” she said. And the increase is not driven by crime rates, which have fluctuated since the 1970s, she added.
“The engine of mass incarceration has been the drug war,” she said,
which she contends in her book has been waged almost exclusively against poor African-Americans and in “ghetto communities.”
And the war on drugs simply rewards higher numbers of arrests,
Alexander said, which often results in the arrests of large numbers of black and poor people for relatively minor drug offenses.
The end result is a sometimes permanent under-caste that “has been created in an astonishingly short period of time — a new Jim Crow system,” Alexander wrote in an article in the Nation magazine.
Often, felons are denied public benefits and might be legally discriminated against in employment and housing, she said. In many states, felons are barred for life from ever receiving food stamps.
Also, federal public housing is barred from those with a felony record for at least five years, she explained.
“How do we expect folks to survive if they’ve been branded felons?” Alexander asked.
Julie Walburn, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said she had not read the book and could not comment on it.
The mission of the corrections department is “to not only house offenders in Ohio’s prisons,” she said in an e-mail, “but prepare the vast majority of them for their eventual return to our communities.
This is a responsibility that we take very seriously.”
She acknowledged Ohio’s high imprisonment rate and said numbers were “nearing all-time highs.” At the beginning of the year, there were 51,606 people in Ohio’s prisons according to the Pew Center.
As a result, the department has advocated for sentencing reform for low-level offenders, including some involving drug offenses, she said. And it had begun “to make tough decisions” about alternatives for those offenders including parole, halfway houses and
intervention rather than imprisonment.
Yeura Venters, the Franklin County public defender, said he supports the use of community alternatives “prior to sending someone off to jail,” rather than using prison “as a first alternative.”
But Alexander said the problem is with the felony label, which some people are “branded with,” she said.
“Millions of people of color are now saddled with criminal records,” Alexander wrote in the Nation article, “and legally denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for,” such as the rights to serve on juries and to vote.
Many of the rules and laws against those with a felony record “virtually ensure that they will be destined to a life of cycling in and out of prison until someday, in all of our generosity, we lock them up, say, ‘It’s your third strike,’ and we throw away the key,” she said.
Walburn said the corrections department had been a “strong advocate” for legislation that might make it less difficult for those with a felony conviction to get a job. Ohio House Bill 130, which was passed in 2008, states “that a felony conviction does not by itself constitute grounds for denying employment,” she said.
Venters, the public defender, said efforts to remove some of the barriers faced by those with a felony record are “headed in the right direction.” Alexander said she supports reform, but that such isolated efforts alone would not end mass incarceration. She argues in her book that only a large-scale social movement will do that.
Alexander has spoken of the kind of social movement she believes is needed in speeches and lectures around the country to promote her book. After appearances on CNN, PBS and C-SPAN, among others, she returned to OSU for two speaking engagements on campus.
At a speech at the Hale Center two weeks ago, Alexander said she envisions a multi-racial and multi-ethnic movement, “which recognizes that although this War on Drugs was born with black folks in mind, it now harms and destroys the lives of people of all colors,” she said.
Many members of the crowd, a diverse mix of college students and community members clothed in jeans, power-suits and kente cloth alike, nodded their agreement.
During the question-and-answer session afterward, though, Melissa Crum, a graduate student in art education, seemed frustrated as she asked about how to start a movement.
Alexander acknowledged that it’s hard to describe in a sound bite.
“But the most important thing I think we can do at this stage,” she said, “is to raise consciousness, to break the silence.”
Often, the biggest hurdle is the shame attached to being a felon, she said, and it is difficult to organize politically until that can be overcome.
“You know, it’s not just the denial of the job but the look that flashes across an employer’s face when he sees that box has been checked,” she said toward the end of her speech. “It’s not just the denial of housing but the shame of having to beg your grandma for a place to sleep at night because … no one else will take you in.”
