“The New Jim Crow”

Black history can be described as a complex honeycomb of events, actors and heroes that intertwine to form a rich history within the American tapestry. Often forgotten in this history, however, is the black worker—an afterthought to the civil rights struggle and fight for basic human rights. For instance, many are unaware that when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, he was there to support a garbage workers’ union strike. Looking back, this can be seen as a clear indication that workers’ rights are forever conjoined with human rights.

Additionally, many are unaware that the labor of millions of imprisoned men is used for private gain. Though it is an issue of delicacy and contention, we no longer have the benefit of ignoring what is taking place within our prison system.

When former Teamsters General President James R. Hoffa became a powerful voice for the National Association for Justice, he spoke of factors that helped to increase the prison population: high levels of recidivism, lack of education for prisoners and unnecessarily harsh conditions behind bars.

In this same brave spirit, Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow,” makes convincing arguments on how these trends have developed and some factors accelerated their expansion. Whether or not you agree with her perspective, it is important to listen, with an open and critical mind, to one of the newest challenges facing the black community and the American labor movement.

The following interview with Michelle Alexander allows her to continue to shine a light on this overlooked issue plaguing a major sector of our population and simultaneously weakening the strength of the labor movement.

Why did you title your book, “The New Jim Crow”?

The title is meant to be provocative. It is also meant to describe an important—but rarely acknowledged—reality. Today, an astounding percentage of the African American community is locked in a permanent second-class status, in which they can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much like their grandparents before them, who lived under an explicit system of racial control.

The old Jim Crow regime openly discriminated on the basis of race. Decades later, many of the same results are achieved through our criminal justice system. By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control. In the current era, it is no longer permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. The old forms of discrimination and social exclusion are suddenly legal once you’re labeled a felon. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

What do you mean when you say there is a new racial caste system in America?

I mean there is a current system of laws, policies, and customs that permanently lock a group defined largely by race into an inferior, second-class status. Most people in America cling to the idea that, no matter how poor you are, or how bad your life circumstances may be, you are always free to climb the ladder of opportunity. But what is completely missed in public debates about the plight of African Americans is that a huge percentage of them (a majority of working-age African American men in some major cities) are not free to move up at all.

It’s not just that they attend bad schools or are plagued by poverty. They are barred by law from doing so. The system operates through our criminal justice institutions, but it functions more like a caste system than a system of crime control. Once labeled a felon, you are branded for life—locked into an inferior status in which discrimination against you is perfectly legal. The hundreds of thousands of African Americans released from prison every year are part a racial undercaste—a lower caste of individuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society.

How does this concept relate to the size of America’s prison system?

Our prison system has grown exponentially over the past few decades. Quintupled. No other country in the world imprisons so many people; and no other country imprisons such a large percentage of its ethnic or racial minorities. We are the world leader in imprisonment. And this astounding, unprecedented increase is due largely to the War on Drugs—a war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. That’s right. Some studies indicate that white youth are actually more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Most people, though, imagine that the dramatic expansion of the prison system is rooted in crime rates. That’s not true. Nor is it the case that most people labeled felons are violent criminals. Quite to the contrary, millions of people have been branded felons for engaging in non-violent, drug related activity—the very conduct that is routinely ignored in middle-class, white communities. The War on Drugs is not a war on drugs; it is a war on poor communities of color. The result has been the creation of a vast new undercaste.

What type of employment hurdles are blacks facing when they are released from incarceration?

Formerly incarcerated black men are the most severely disadvantaged applicants in the modern job market. Although all job applicants—regardless of race—are harmed by a criminal record, the harm is not equally felt. African American men convicted of felonies are the least likely to receive job offers of any demographic group. And the prevailing racial stereotype of black men as criminals—a stereotype created in part by the drug war—harms black men without a criminal record. Recent research shows that white men with a criminal record are actually more likely to be hired than black men without a criminal record.

Once released from prison, formerly incarcerated people quickly discover that nearly all employers discriminate based on prior criminal history. Job applications for jobs ranging from McDonald’s clerk to accountant ask whether the applicant has been convicted of a felony and routinely discriminate on that basis. To make matters worse, most states deny licenses for a wide range of professions based on felony convictions. In some states you can’t even get a license to be a barber if you’re a felon!

How do some corporations benefit from slave labor in prisons?

Many people do not realize that slavery is legal in prison. The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery, but created one exception: forced labor in prison. With the quintupling of our prison system, prisons have become big business. Rich and powerful people, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, have invested millions in private prisons. Private prisons, as well as government-run prisons, frequently use prison labor to build furniture, make cars, serve as customer service representatives, and make clothes (including military gear for soldiers serving in Iraq), paying them pennies on the dollar.

Does this affect unions and if so how?

It absolutely affects union jobs. Most of the jobs performed in prisons today are the types of jobs that would be unionized if performed in the free world. Corporations have managed to avoid paying decent wages, providing health care, and other benefits not only by shipping jobs overseas, but also by using prison labor. A top priority for any union, in my view, should be ending mass incarceration in America.

What solutions do you offer in your book for workers of all types wanting to change these trends and unite against these challenges?

I argue that nothing short of a broad-based social movement can successfully topple mass incarceration. This movement must unite people and workers of all colors, since it has been divide-and-conquer tactics that have preserved racial hierarchy for centuries and have prevented American workers from securing many of the basic human rights and worker protections that people in most other Western democracies take for granted.

A longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, Michelle Alexander was a 2005 Soros Justice Fellow. She holds a joint appointment at the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in Columbus, Ohio, where she lives. “The New Jim Crow” is her first book and can be found at www.newjimcrow.com.