- Michelle Alexander
By Michelle Alexander
How a Human Rights Nightmare Can Happen in Our Country on Our Watch — and Go Virtually Undiscussed
If we fail to commit ourselves to ending mass incarceration, future generations will judge us harshly.
April 28, 2011
So much about our racial reality today is little more than a mirage. The promised land of racial equality wavers, quivers just out of our reach in the barren desert of our new, “colorblind” political landscape. It looks so good from a distance: Barack Obama, our nation’s first black president, standing in the Rose Garden behind a podium looking handsome, dignified, and in charge. Flip the channel and there’s Michelle Obama, a brown-skinned woman, digging a garden in the backyard of the White House — not as a servant or a maid — but as the first lady, schooling the nation on better health and the need to be good stewards of our planet. Flip the channel again and there’s the whole Obama family exiting Air Force One, waving to the crowd, descending the flight of stairs — a gorgeous black family living in the White House, ruling America, cheered by the world.
Drive a few blocks from the White House and you find the Other America. You find you’re still in the desert, dying of thirst, wondering what wrong turn was made, and how you managed to miss the promised land, though you reached for it with all your might.
A vast new racial undercaste now exists in America, though their plight is rarely mentioned on the evening news. Obama won’t mention it; the Tea Party won’t mention it; media pundits would rather talk about anything else. The members of the undercaste are largely invisible to those of us who have jobs, live in decent neighborhoods, and zoom around on freeways, passing by the virtual and literal prisons in which they live.
But here are the facts. There are more African American adults under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. In major urban areas, like Chicago — Obama’s hometown — the majority of working-age African American men have criminal records are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. Millions of people in the United States, primarily poor people of color, are denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement: the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and the right to be free from discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. They have been branded “criminals” and “felons” and now find themselves relegated to a permanent, second-class status for the rest of their lives. They live in a parallel social universe, the Other America.
We, as a nation, are in deep denial about how this came to pass. On the rare occasions when the existence of “them” — the others, the ghetto dwellers, those locked up and locked out — is publicly acknowledged, standard excuses are trotted out for their condition. We’re told black culture, bad schools, poverty, and broken homes are to blame. Almost no one admits: We declared war. We declared a war on them. We declared a war on the most vulnerable people in our society and then blamed them for the wreckage.
And yet that is precisely what we did. We declared a war known as the War on Drugs. The war has driven the quintupling of our prison population in a few short decades. The vast majority of the startling increase in incarceration in America is traceable to the arrest and imprisonment of poor people of color for non-violent, drug-related offenses. Families have been torn apart, young lives shattered, as parents grieve the loss of loved ones to the system, often hiding their grief under a cloak of shame. Politicians claim that the enemy in this war in is a thing — “drugs” — not a group of people, but the facts prove otherwise.
African Americans have been admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate up to 57 times higher than whites. In some states, 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison have been African American. The rate of Latino imprisonment has been staggering as well. Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black and Latino.
Studies have consistently shown that people of all colors use and sell drugs at remarkably similar rates, yet this war has been waged almost exclusively in poor, ghetto communities. For those who are tempted to imagine that the goal of the war has been to root out violent offenders or drug kingpins, think again. Federal funding flows to those state and local law enforcement agencies that boost dramatically the sheer volume of drug arrests; it’s a numbers game. Agencies don’t get rewarded for bringing down drug bosses or arresting violent offenders. They’re rewarded in cash for arresting people en masse. Ghetto communities are swept for the “low hanging fruit” — which generally means young people hanging out the street corner, walking to school or the subway, or driving around with their friends. They’re stopped and searched for any reason or no reason at all. In 2005, for example, 4 out of 5 drug arrests were for possession; only one of five for sales. And in the 1990’s — the period of the most drastic expansion of the drug war — nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests were for marijuana possession, a drug less harmful than alcohol and tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle class white communities and on college campuses, as it is in poor communities of color.
The drug war, though, has been waged almost exclusively in poor, ghetto communities. It is here, in the poverty-stricken, racially segregated ghettos, where the War on Poverty has been abandoned and factory jobs have disappeared, that the drug war has been waged with the greatest ferocity. SWAT teams are deployed here; buy-bust operations are concentrated here; drug raids of schools and housing projects occur here; stop-and-frisk operations are conducted on the streets. If the tactics of the drug war were employed in middle class white neighborhoods or college campuses there would be public outrage; the war would end overnight. But here in the ghetto, the stops, searches, sweeps, and mass arrests are treated like an accepted fact of life, like the separate water fountains of an earlier era. By the millions, people are arrested, marched into courtrooms in shackles, and when released, they’re stripped of their right to vote and their right to serve on juries. Discrimination against them is officially legal. Barred from public housing and denied even food stamps, millions find they are deemed unworthy of the nation’s care or concern. Jobless, hungry, without shelter, and riddled with shame, they’re trapped in the desert wasteland. The majority of those released from prison return within months of their release, unable to make it on the outside. The racial mirage wavers in the distance, mockingly.
It is impossible to imagine anything like this happening if the enemy in the drug war were white. Economist Glenn Loury made this observation in his book The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. He noted that it is nearly impossible to imagine anything remotely similar to mass incarceration happening to young white men. Can we envision a system that would enforce drug laws almost exclusively against young white men and largely ignore drug crime among young black men? Can we imagine large majorities of young white men being rounded up for minor drug offenses, placed under the control of the criminal justice system, labeled felons, and then subjected to a lifetime of discrimination, scorn and exclusion? Can we imagine this happening while most black men landed decent jobs or trotted off to college? No, we cannot. If such a thing occurred, it would occasion a most profound reflection about what had gone wrong, not with them, but us — all of us. It would never be dismissed with the thought that white men were simply reaping what they have sown. The large-scale criminalization of white men would disturb us to the core.
So the critical questions become: What disturbs us? What upsets us? What seems anomalous? What is contrary to expectation? Or more to the point: Whom do we care about?
An answer to the last question may be found by considering the drastically different manner that we, as a nation, responded to drunk driving in the mid-1980s, as compared to crack cocaine. During the 1980s, at the same time the “crack epidemic” was making headlines, a broad-based grassroots movement was under way to address the widespread and sometimes fatal problem of drunk driving. Unlike the drug war, which was initiated by political elites long before ordinary people identified drug crime as an issue of extraordinary concern, the movement to crack down on drunk drivers was a bottom-up movement, led most notably by mothers whose families were shattered by deaths caused by drunk driving.
Media coverage of the movement peaked in 1988, when a drunk driver traveling the wrong way on Interstate 71 in Kentucky caused a head-on collision with a school bus. Twenty-seven people died and dozens more were injured in the ensuing fire. The tragic accident, known as the Carrollton bus disaster, was one of the worst in U.S. history. In the aftermath, several parents of the victims became actively involved in Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), and one became its national president. Throughout the 1980s, drunk driving was a regular topic in the media, and the term “designated driver” became part of the American lexicon.
At the close of the decade, dunk drivers were responsible for approximately 22,000 deaths annually, while overall alcohol-related deaths were close to 100,000 a year. By contrast, during the same time period, there were no prevalence statistics at all on crack, much less crack-related deaths. In fact, the number of deaths related to all illegal drugs combined was tiny compared to the number of deaths caused by drunk drivers. The total of all drug-related deaths due to AIDS, drug overdose, or the violence associated with the illegal drug trade, was estimated at 21,000 annually — less than the number of deaths directly caused by drunk drivers, and a small fraction of the number of alcohol-related deaths that occur every year.
In response to growing concern — fueled by advocacy groups such as MADD and by the media coverage of drunk-driving fatalities — most states adopted tougher laws to punish drunk driving. Numerous states now have some type of mandatory sentencing for this offense — typically two days in jail for a first offense and two to ten days for a second offense. New laws governing crack cocaine were passed at the same time as legislatures were “getting tough” on drunk drivers. But notice the contrast: While drunk driving results in a few days in prison, possession of a tiny amount of crack carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in federal prison. In fact, some people are serving life sentences for minor drug offenses. In Harmelin v. Michigan, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a sentence of life imprisonment for a defendant with no prior convictions who tried to sell 23 ounces of crack cocaine. The Court concluded that life imprisonment was not “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment, despite the fact that no other developed country in the world imposes life imprisonment for a first time drug offense.
The vastly different sentences afforded drunk drivers and drug offenders speaks volumes regarding who is viewed as disposable — someone to be purged from the body politic — and who is not. Drunk drivers are predominately white and male. White men comprised 78 percent of the arrests for drunk driving when new mandatory minimums for the offense were being adopted. They are generally charged with misdemeanors and typically receive sentences involving fines, license suspension, and community service. Although drunk driving carriers are far greater risk of violent death than the use or sale of illegal drugs, the societal response to drunk drivers has generally emphasized keeping the person functional and in society, while attempting to respond to the dangerous behavior through treatment and counseling. People charged with drug offenses, though, are disproportionately poor people of color. They are typically charged with felonies and sentenced to prison. If and when they’re released, they become members of the undercaste, no longer locked up, but locked out — for the rest of their lives.
This is not a problem begging merely for policy reform. Much more is required of us. If we fail, as a nation, to awaken to the basic humanity of all those cycling in and out of prison today, and if we fail to commit ourselves to ending mass incarceration, future generations will judge us harshly. A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch.
We must do more than bring water to those stranded in the desert. We must act with courage and tell the truth about what is happening in the Other America. In the words of Cornell West, “justice is what love looks like in public.” If we aim to show love, we must be willing to work for justice.
Michelle Alexander holds a joint appointment with the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnic
Friends of Justice 
I hope this article can attract a wide audience. This is a problem which we must discuss. It must not be swept under the rug any longer. Where did this article originally appear?
I have a few problems with this article, however I am by no means an expert on racial matters and happen to be a white male myself. This reply is in no way intended to be a white vs black argument either. With that said, what support is there for the fact that white’s are the majority of drug users and dealers?
Also, is this article defending people who choose to possess illegal substances by saying that they are less harmful than alcohol? I do believe the punishment for drunk driving should be much more severe, 10 years in prison for the first offense and never allowed to drive again. It’s ridiculous to think that people should be allowed to drink and drive with multiple shots at it when so many people are put at risk when they decide to drink and drive. However, the punishment for possessing and dealing illegal substances is there to prevent people from doing the drugs. Why do the people just not buy the drugs? Its not a black and white racial issue – its a right vs wrong issue. These people would not be relegated to a life in the “Other America”, unable to vote, if they would follow the laws of this country.
Just because you don’t think its wrong doesn’t mean you should do it. What benefit is there to buying a little weed here, a little crack there – nothing. I personally have a sister who ruined a large portion of her middle school and high school life by doing drugs and drinking her life away. You can never get those precious days and hours back.
At the risk of sounding like a DARE cop…Just say NO! It’s as simple as that. There may be pressure from friends, but the guy who said no will look like the smart one when he can vote and own a gun a few years down the road.
I didn’t proofread that so feel free to make fun.
“…..what support is there for the fact that white’s are the majority of drug users and dealers? “
My guess is that the numbers come from surveys that do not involve the any interaction with the justice system, and the danger of prosecution to the respondents.
Certainly the relative rates of arrest, prosecution, conviction and imprisonment in increasing order of blacks and whites suggest that Blacks are the main users and traders of illegal drugs and it is hard to hold the idea that the discrepancies are solely the result of bias in the system. Michelle Alexander herself initially dismissed this hypothesis and only came around to it after years of studying the system in detail.
The unpleasant truth is that it is the nature of human nature that humans discriminate against those they see as different from themselves and the discrimination is channeled by mechanisms requiring collective action such as the legal system. Discrimination by race, by caste, by ethnic group by religious affiliation is normal and ubiquitous. Most people wrongly think that racism for example is a rare phenomenon that only occurred in Nazi occupied Europe, in Apartheid South Africa and in the pre-nineteen sixties South of the US. They are in this WRONG, WRONG, WRONG ……. In fact it the absence of prejudice that is rare. Most people see their prejudices against the various classes of contemptible people being no more than common sense since most of the people they talk to have the same beliefs. It is hard for one to hold on to a belief when everyone one encounters says different.
The justice system works in stages, first there is suspicion of a crime, then investigation, then arrest, then decision on the severity of charge, then prosecution, then the jury’s verdict and finally the judges sentence. Every one of these stages is affected by prejudice and Blacks fare worse than whites. Even a low difference in prejudice against Blacks relative to whites compounds up the chain. For example suppose the effect of prejudice at each stage against blacks relative to whites is a mere 20% (just a number picked out of the air as an example of compunding, I am not suggesting that 20% is the exact number at any stage) after the seven stages that compounds to 258% more prison time for Blacks relative to whites.
There is rule than when one section of society is seen by society as P% for prone to a certain crime than society as a whole the difference in response in terms of enforcement is nonlinear and considerably more than P%. Resources for law enforcement are limited and the enforcers are judged by results so it is natural for them to concentrate their efforts where they think they will get the highest return. This mechanism is universal and does not need racism to explain it. In addition for law enforces wanting good statistics it makes sense to concentrate on small crimes by poor people as poor people do not have access to the same legal fire power to defend themselves as do those who are well off. This discrimination occurs in the application of all laws, where the law is necessary and legitimate this is something that has to be accepted. However if the law defines normal human behaviour such as using mind altering substances as criminal, there occur so many breaches that no feasible enforcement budget can result in detection and prosecution more than a tiny fraction. In this case bias enforcement can become both extreme and yet unnoticed.
“Also, is this article defending people who choose to possess illegal substances by saying that they are less harmful than alcohol?”
People justify the laws against certain drigs not because using them is immoral but because of the harm caused. Only a fool would assert that all drugs are harmless for all users under all circumstances as we can see from considering the damage caused by legal drugs, ethyl alcohol and nicotine. However I do not believe that that those drugs we define as evil are nearly as destructive as they are perceived to be an if one examines the causality behind the harm one finds that much of the harm comes from the interaction of the drugswith the laws and societies attitudes to criminal users. In addition the harm caused by the laws is either ignored or considered to be due to the drugs or considered to be a good thing because it happens to bad people.
Let us consider opiates. Opium can be taken orally, by smoking or by injection. I have listed these means in increasing order both potential for damage and effectiveness in terms of cost. Taking by injection gets the most effect from the smallest amount of a substance rendered expensive by prohibition but is also the most dangerous in terms of risks of overdose, damage to veins, infection from using in unhygienic conditions and infection from dangerous diseases such as hepatitis B and C and HIV from sharing needles, yet prohibition results in most users injecting. In addition one can only acquire opiates from criminal dealers who have no great concern for what they mix with it or for standardizing the concentration of the active substance so that the proportional variation in concentration between different buys is of the same order of magnitude as the difference between an effective dose and one that is fatal.
It may be that the fact that opium is illegal results in fewer people using but at the cost of increasing the damage to those who disobey the law. Those determined to use do so so in secret so that there is no one to help if they overdose and if the do overdose in company those who are with them are often deterred from summoning help by the threat of the laws.
The relevance of Michelle Alexander’s comparison of laws against illegal drugs and against drink driving, is that the difference makes no sense if harm caused is the only criterion. Therefore there is some other motive prompting America’s attachment to the laws against certain mind altering substances. If one examines the history by which the three main illegal drugs opium, cocaine and marijuana became illegal one finds that in each case there was an explicitly racist campaign against a minority group that was found threatening to white Americans. Opium became illegal when the US had more Chinese than were acceptable and the fact that Chinese used opium as a recreational drug just as white people used alcohol and tobacco made outlawing opium a convenient way of defining the Chinese as criminals. The campaign worked on fears of white women having sex with Chinese in opium dens. For cocaine, the racial threat came from Negroes who were thought to be the main users and to be dangerous to white women when using. Finally marijuana was thought to be used by Mexicans who were driven crazy by it. I suspect that many supporters of prohibition are in fact aware that the drug laws selectively damage Blacks and are quite pleased with that situation.
The fact is that normal human behavior is resistant to change no matter how draconian the punishments and drug use is normal human behaviour.
Despite the assertion that Whites use drugs at a greater rate than Blacks, it would not surprise me if it were found that members of the Black underclass use drugs at a greater rate. People use drugs for multiple reasons and different people have different reasons. Some people use drugs because it makes them feel good but others because their normal state of consciousness is so unpleasant that life is only bearable when blotted out by heroin, or marijuana or alcohol or petrol fumes. When respectable people get depressed they can get their psychiatrist to prescribe Prozac, but members of the underclass have no access to psychiatrists and in addition their depression may be so severe that only opium works. For members of the underclass depression is the result of any rational consideration of their position and realization that realisticly there is no hope of any better in any future. In Australia the overall community rate of heroin use is 2% but in the Black ghetto of Redfern in Sydney where the unwanted descendants of the unlawful occupants prior to white settlement cluster the rate among Aboriginal teenagers is 30%.
Since our response to people self medicating for their misery with illegal drugs is to punish them to make them more miserable it is unsurprising that it does not work.
The drug laws provide an socially acceptable means of discriminating against those we dislike and making them scapegoats, but the drugs are useful scapegoats themselves. Society can blame drugs for certain social conditions that are in fact the result of choices society has made collectively such as how little to spend to the benefit of poor people and where not to locate jobs that Black people can do.
“Just say NO! It’s as simple as that. There may be pressure from friends, but the guy who said no will look like the smart one when he can vote and own a gun a few years down the road.”
I don’t think you realize just what a cheap shot your statement above is.
If the laws were enforced on the white children of the respectable classes at the same rate that they are in the ghettos under army of occupation policing your above statement would be reasonable. In that case respectable white people would see their own children’s lives wrecked and see them losing their rights to vote and use guns at the same rate that ghetto children are suffering. They might then choose to vote for politicians who promise to maintain this situation, or more likely otherwise. However the toll of collateral damage of the drug war is sufficiently low on white people that they see it as acceptable.
I don’t think you really just what a cheap shot this “Just say no” message is. Normal human behaviour is refractory to modification by even the most draconian of laws and when drug use is response to existing misery even more so. Your statement also supposes that not using drugs is an infallible means of avoiding conviction. For residents of the Black ghetto this is not so. Any evidence no matter how thin is enough to get a Black person prosecuted and if that person is so foolish as to go to trial the greatest probability is that he will be convicted. The presumption of innocence does not exist unless juries give decide to give it and for Black people charged for drug offences they don’t. Most Black people so prosecuted will take a plea bargain and not risk going to trial. If you disbelieve this then buy a book on the Tulia Drug scandal such as by Nate Blakeslee or Alan Bean, or watch the film “American Velvet”.
Nate Blakeslee’s book is titled “Tulia: Race Cocaine and Corruption in a Small Texas Town” and Alan Bean’s “Taking out the Trash in Tulia Texas”. In addition Michelle Alexander’s full argument of which the above article is a precis can be found in her book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”. I do not believe that an open minded person could read Michelle Alexander’s book without being shocked by the overwhelming discrimination that she documents.
Mr. Krueger,
The example of drunk driving laws and crack cocaine laws was used because they were passed at the same time, and they were focussed on 2 different socio-economic and racial groups.
Sentencing for the white drunk drivers whose crime was potentially deadly was motivated by the need to shock them into change, and to get them back into productive life while preventing a repeat offense. Sentencing for the “urban scourge” of crack cocaine, the same drug sniffed by fashionable white people, but now in a “scary” smokable form almost exclusively used by poor blacks (but without the evidence of harm as for drunk driving), was set at about 100 times the penalty for powder cocaine. This disparity has only recently been addressed. Racism can be systemic and yet not be dependent on personal malice or intellectual beliefs about racial inferiority. Racism in a system can be inferred from, at least, grossly inequitable results. I’ve lived 50 years as a white woman in a racist society.
“Just say No” you said? How profound. The one thing each of us have, human beings, is control over our bodies. To have another human being, or group of human beings, telling us what we can and can’t put in our bodies is the hight of arrogance and hubris. We live in and maintain these bodies 24/7, we can’t escape except by suicide or death, nobody has the right to tell us what we can and can’t do with it. That is fundamental. The same ones that imposed this prohibition are the same ones that committed genocide on the American Indians, slavery on Africans, Jim Crow, ghettoization, and mass incarceration fueled by their drug prohibition. They are the same ones responsible for the slaughter and fratricide going on in Mexico because of their prohibition. Meanwhile they kill more with their approved drugs than are killed by misuse of all illicit drugs. Just say NO?!? Yes, no to these sanctimonious hypocrites that tell us to “JUST SAY NO”.