“More African-American men are in prison, or on parole, than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War,” said Professor Michelle Alexander in a recent telephone interview. “A black child today has less of a chance of being raised by his parents than a child during slavery,” she added.
Alexander is author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness,” which chronicles how racial politics has given birth to America’s cycle of massive incarceration – driven primarily by the aggressive arrest and conviction for non-violent and drug-related crimes.
Alexander clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun and one of President Obama’s mentors, federal Judge Abner Mikva.
She said, “Politicians have used racial politics for political gain, which has given birth to massive incarceration. But for the racial politics, massive incarceration would not exist today.”
“Today 80 percent of African-American kids will not grow with their father,” said Alexander.
“The system of mass incarceration has decimated black families,” said Alexander. “Women shrug their shoulders and ask, ‘What’s wrong with black men?’ People seem to think black men decided they did not want to get married anymore. That is not what happened,” Alexander said. “This is due to mass incarceration.”
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan declared a war on drugs when drug crimes were on the decline. Alexander attributed growing crime rates over the past 30 years to “the war on drugs (being) waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color.”
“I’ve seen a shift in rhetoric, but I haven’t seen a shift in policy,” she added, “We’ve spent $1 trillion on the drug war since it began; that money could’ve been spent on drug-treatment programs.”
The media facilitated the rise of mass incarceration, she added, and the most damaging imagery came from the Reagan Administration.
The new Jim Crow Era can be traced to the prison system, she said. “Once branded a felon, discrimination can be practiced against you with impunity. People returning from prison find themselves jobless, penniless, barred from public housing, often denied food and unable to vote,” she added. For years, Alexander served as the director of the Racial Injustice Project for the ACLU of Northern California, which spearheaded a national campaign against racial profiling by law enforcement.
She told the story of an African-American man about 19 who came into her office. At first she was put off by his felony conviction. But he told her he had been a victim of the notorious Oakland Riders, a group of renegade police officers.
At one point federal District Court Judge Thelton Henderson threatened to place the Oakland Police Department under federal control over its nearly nine-year failure to reform such abuses.
Alexander holds a joint appointment with the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. As a former associate at the law firm of Saperstein, Goldstein, Demchak & Baller, she specialized in class action lawsuits alleging race and gender discrimination.
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