“The New Jim Crown” by Michelle Alexander focuses on a central issue of our time: the penal system. Increasingly research into criminology seems to tell us that putting non-violent offenders behind bars has little positive effect on crime rates and only further hardens them, making them more likely to become possible violent offenders. Sociologists and economists will talk about the economic effects of mass incarceration, both at a macro and micro level: at a macro level, it is costing our nation between $30,000-$40,000 a year for every one of the 2 million behind bars—at a micro level it devastates African American communities and prevents families from ever accruing any real markers of wealth. Research into psychology also should lead us as a nation to question how culpable some of these criminals truly are. Surely many need to be contained, rehabilitated, or monitored—however as in the case of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally handicapped man executed under the Clinton administration who “had so little conception of what was about to happen to him that he asked for the dessert from his last meal to be saved for him until the morning,” clearly we are treating punishment as the de facto response, rather then recognizing that many criminals likely suffer from mental illness of some sort or the other, questions of free agency aside (56).
While I do not believe I can truly disagree with many of Alexander’s assertions, I do slightly take issue with the motives she believes underlie our massive penal system. Alexander believes slavery transitioned to Jim Crow Segregation, from there to engineered class antagonisms and social and economic discrimination, which then led to the mass incarceration of blacks today, what she deems the “New Jim Crow.” The motivation she believes is racism. While I agree racism is likely a predominant factor, I do not think it is the only one, and perhaps not even the primary one. This is because the politicians engineering these “tough on crime” laws and rhetoric are doing so for personal political gain—it is all self-serving. If interest served them, they probably would throw Lithuanians as a people under the carpet. I think the motivation is more personal political fame and wealth, and the people seeking this will do anything to obtain it, including stoke class or race antagonisms. While I agree with Alexander that many of the politicians egging these incarceration laws forward are morally bankrupt, I also thinking that a good deal of them are likely too intelligent to truly believe racist rhetoric themselves—that based on phenotypic differences some people are inherently better than others—rather I think they simply want to further themselves and will do so by any method possible.
The one issue I take with Alexander is that many of her statistics seem cherry picked, or that she simply misunderstood them. In the introduction, she states that while between the 1960’s and 1970’s Germany, Finland, and the US had approx. the same crime rates, the US prison rate dwarfed that of Germany and Finland. From the brief research I’ve done, she seems to be conflating petty crime with violent crime. Yes, they may have had overall similar crime rates, but not murder rates or gun violence—given that both Germany and Finland don’t make it easy to obtain guns—which to some extent could explain why the US imprisoned more (only to an extent). Additionally, she states that Blacks and Hispanics are no more likely to commit crimes than whites, statistically. While it is true that of course no race is naturally more violent than another, if you look simply at homicides in NYC, over 85% are perpetrated by blacks and Hispanics, as are the victims over 80% black or Hispanic. Naturally this is due to socioeconomic circumstances. I don’t have a specific reference here, but in the last seminar class we did some research into this phenomenon. These were just two statements regarding stats in the intro that I took issue with, though reading further there are too many to count.
The question I would ask you is do you know someone in prison and do you think they deserve to be there?
-Jesse Geisler
