Jim Crow by the Back Door

The New Jim Crow - Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

by Michelle Alexander

Many statistics would seem to bear out the author's contention that the War on Drugs (itself, a failed policy) has served to "keep blacks in their place", essentially in the same way that slavery, and later, the Jim Crow laws, served to do.

As the NAACP's website shows:

• Between 1980 and 2015, the number of people incarcerated in America increased from roughly 500,000 to over 2.2 million.
• Today, the United States makes up about 5% of the world’s population and has 21% of the world’s prisoners.
• 1 in every 37 adults in the United States, or 2.7% of the adult population, is under some form of correctional supervision.
• In 2014, African Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34%, of the total 6.8 million correctional population.
• African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites.

As the author points out, a very large proportion of those people in prison ended up there as a result of a conviction for minor drug offenses - possession of marijuana, for example.  And most of them caught up in this have been blacks, despite the fact that drug use is at least as prevalent among white people.  The way the War on Drugs has been enforced has disproportionately targeted blacks, especially young, black, males.

This has had a major impact on black communities across America.  Reduced access to education, housing, jobs and even the right to vote. 

The New York Times posted this review....

As they say: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose