In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that the American penal system targets and disenfranchises young black men, effectively replicating many of the discriminatory policies of the “old” Jim Crow Era. In her introduction, she outlines the mechanisms that have created this new caste system and placed young black men at the fringes of our society. She focuses on the concept of “mass incarceration,” in which over 2 million Americans are currently imprisoned and one in three young black men is currently in prison, in jail, or on parole (9). Alexander also cautions us not to downplay the oppressiveness as the penal system by saying that it is simply another institution whose racism is a shrinking holdover of a past era. Rather, she argues that the penal system has become a tool of repression whose influence is pervasive throughout our society. Alexander explains that we must engage in a open conversation about “the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetuating racial hierarchy in the United States” (16). She asserts that the elimination of mass incarceration is not enough; if we do not confront the role of race in our society, as well as in our penal system, we simply invite another mechanism of repression.

Alexander focuses on our illusion that the racial injustice of the criminal justice system is gone. She describes the lack of activism with regard to the repression and disenfranchisement of the penal system; groups have instead focused on issues such as affirmative action. Alexander is correct. Rarely have I seen racial incarceration issues made topics of social conversation. When issues of race in the criminal justice system do enter the public sphere, it is usually in the context of racial profiling, mandatory minimums, policy brutality, etc. These matters are no doubt worthy of extensive social discourse and may, in fact, also be symptomatic of the system of mass incarceration as a whole, but focusing on them draws attention away from the greater issue of imprisonment. For instance, the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his own home was widely publicized and was met with outrage throughout activist communities. It seems to me that some degree of racism was involved in the arrest, and Gates and his supporters certainly had cause for outrage, but the media coverage was immensely disproportionate to the situation. In contrast, we rarely see articles discussing the widespread disenfranchisement experienced by those in the penal system.

Why do we as a society (particularly the media and activist groups) avoid these inquiries? I think we avoid them (at least in some part) because the mechanism of disenfranchisement has in fact been so effective. The majority of society has little to no interaction with even the idea of incarceration. We feel no connection to the “underclass” (of mostly young black males) that Alexander describes. As a result, we find it easy to ignore the systematic discrimination that confines vast segments of the black population to the fringes of society. However, for those who are forced to confront the thought of incarceration on a daily basis, the issue of systemic disenfranchisement is increasingly salient. Why do we maintain our own illusion that the systematic racism of the past has been eliminated? How do we push the role of race in our country to the forefront of social discourse? How can we reverse the process of disenfranchisement that the criminal justice system has perpetuated? How do we rebuild the connection between those exposed to imprisonment and the rest of society? Hopefully, considering these questions (and many others) will allow us to begin to engage in a candid discussion about the phenomenon of mass incarceration and the racial disenfranchisement that pervades the American penal system.