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

The key thesis to Alexander’s book—the notion that mass incarceration and the War on Drugs are systems of social control—contradicts the conventional wisdom that the prison system was expanded to deter crime. While many Americans were already skeptical of mass incarceration as an effective form of crime prevention, Alexander takes the argument a step further to suggest that this was never the intent of the system to begin with. Rather, she views mass incarceration as the product of a concerted political effort to exploit white racial anxieties by casting Black males as criminals.

Among the biggest pieces of evidence to support this thesis is the fact that the earliest use of the term, “The War of Drugs,” arose as part of President Richard Nixon’s efforts to win over Southern Democrats who felt alienated by their party’s support of the Civil Rights Movement. Given that explicitly racial appeals had become verboten in the years following the Civil Rights Movement, Nixon couched implicitly racial appeals in the race-neutral language of “law and order.” From the start, the War on Drugs was almost entirely a rhetorical tool designed to drive a wedge between white and Black members of the poor and working classes. In fact, hardly any significant policy changes concerning drug enforcement took place during Nixon’s presidency.