Just say "hell no, Jim Crow"

 For the politics book club this month we decided to read Michelle Alexander's bestselling expose of the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. It had been referenced, usually favorably but sometimes with a few critiques, in other book we'd read, such as Angela Davis' Freedom Is a Constant Struggle and James Forman Jr.'s Locking Up Our Own. Alexander also appears in Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th, which Gillian and I watched sometime last year. 

 

As a result I thought I was reasonably well informed already going into the book. This is the work that basically kicked off the current criminal justice reform conversation, which makes it quite successful at one of its stated goals, although it turns out that the current criminal justice reform conversation is goddamn infuriating to anyone who's read pretty much anything about the criminal justice system, because like most political conversations, there's a lot of people saying the same wrong things over and over again. 

 

One thing that was really striking to me when I was reading this book was just how comprehensively bad the system is, especially once all the drug war policies got passed--the worst possible policies and the worst possible norms prevail at every single step of the process, by every single actor in the system. It's just blunt force racism all the way down. Every single step at which "due process" or something was once theoretically a thing has been formally eviscerated because drugs!!! on top of a long history of not being applied to black people in the first place. It really, really should put to bed any real doubts about the practicality of prison abolition even for law 'n' order-y type folks who haven't read anything about prison abolition. Do you care about stuff like rule of law and due process and holding people accountable for anti-social behavior? Then the U.S. prison and policing systems should be anathema to you. Do you like the Bill of Rights and various other U.S. Constitutional Amendments? Then reading this book will make you want to throw all the courts into the sea and replace them with literally anything else, maybe someone reading bird guts. Whatever non-racist things you want getting done that you think we need the police or prison system for: We don't, and if you want the thing done, we should get rid of the current system that's lying to you about having a purpose other than racial control. 

 

There are a couple places where it becomes pretty clear that this book was written a few years ago. It was written before the rise of Black Lives Matter, so I think the level of public awareness of police brutality and capriciousness has inched up a tiny bit, which is good. Somewhat more depressingly, the myth of colorblindness, racist as it is, has taken a bit of a shredding in the past year or two, and the idea that people are racist but don't want to say too explicitly racist things paired a bit funny with the fact that I was trying to cram finishing this book around counterprotesting a literal neo-Nazi rally where people stood on the steps of the Massachusetts Statehouse and yelled about how they wanted to do ethnic cleansing. (Granted, there were only like 30 of them, but still -- five years ago they weren't having rallies at the Statehouse.) On a minor but jarring note, the book references Bill Cosby a few times, but only as a proponent of respectability politics. 

 

But overall, things have really not changed since this book was written. The noises are starting to be a bit different, which I suppose is the first step, but the system remains, with only the most minor of reforms starting to be implemented--frequently at the expense of doubling down somewhere else in order to look balanced and fair, a thing that wasn't necessary when the War on Drugs was being launched but is Obviously Just How Politics Is now. Black Lives Matter has been immediately countered with Blue Lives Matter, like there's some sort of deficit of power and coddling being given to a class that's literally legally allowed to steal people's lunch money like heavily armed, completely immunized from consequences schoolyard bullies. The entire Massachusetts Congressional delegation just voted for a Blue Lives Matter bill in the House. In the last days of the Obama Administration, the DOJ decided to stop contracting with private prisons; Attorney General Evil Keebler Elf reversed the policy before it could be implemented. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently made a big song and dance of reforming a felon disenfranchisement law that will probably end up restoring voting rights to like, ten people. Everything is still trash. Donate to your local bail fund.