The tenth anniversary edition has a 40-page forward that sums up what has happened since the book was written, which at the time was basically a summary of how it has if anything gotten worse. This is the book that you should hand to anyone who says something negative about Black Lives Matter protests and the subsequent graffiti, have them read this book and get back to you.
The police are a part of the incarceration of people of color. They charge more people of color with crimes, whereas whites are more likely to break the law.
This is a stunning indictment of a society that, since the 1980s, has been complicit in the explosion of its prison population from around 300,000 to more than 2 million. Drug convictions have largely fueled the increase, and an extraordinary number of those new felons have been black. This is not coincidental. Additionally, the legalization of marijuana in many states has not led to opening prison doors to those convicted of that as a crime.
In the years following the civil war southern legislators designed laws to thwart the newly emancipated black population, notably curbing voting rights. Under the laws, black people also, increasingly, found themselves incarcerated and put into work camps. If Jim Crow was an effective means of controlling the black population, then modern mass incarceration, is its successor.
The figures are extraordinary. A decade ago in Chicago, for instance, 55% of the adult black male population had a felony record. In quiet yet forceful writing Alexander, a legal scholar, outlines how the Reagan government exploited the hysteria over crack cocaine to demonize the black people so that “black” and “crime” became interchangeable. It was a war – not on drugs – but on black people.
It really is time to look at the 185 billion dollars spent on incarceration and shift it to job creation, affordable housing, and healthcare.
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