The New Jim Crow: One of the most important books published in English so far this century

A review of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander

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These are facts:

• The number of Americans with criminal records is approximately 65 million.
• The highest incidence of the use and sale of illegal drugs is found in communities characterized as White.
• The percentage of federal prisoners convicted of violent crimes is 7.9%.
• The total number of Americans now in prisons and jails or on probation or parole is 7.4 million.
• The greatest increase in funding for the War on Drugs took place during the Administration of Bill Clinton.

How many of those facts were you aware of before reading this post?

If you can honestly say you knew them all, go to the head of the class. If you’re like me, however, chances are you found at least some of them to be surprising — despite the fact that I think of myself as generally well informed. And if you now read Michelle Alexander’s groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow, you’ll come across a never-ending list of surprises about our country’s vaunted criminal justice system.

For example, “The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.” (OK, this is one I already knew. But it never ceases to shock me.) In this extraordinary book, Prof. Alexander explains how this came about largely as a result of the so-called War on Drugs; how the country’s criminal justice system has been warped to the point of nonrecognition by a series of Presidential actions, Congressional legislation, and Supreme Court decisions; how the system of arrests, prosecution, conviction, and sentencing really works now; and the catastrophic consequences of this sequence of events for our cities, our African-American and Latino communities, and ourselves. The New Jim Crow is one of the most important books published in the English language in a great many years, because it dispels so many of our cherished illusions and takes no prisoners in naming those responsible or in proposing remedies.

For starters, “The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran.” The number of prisoners of African-American and Latino descent is wildly out of proportion to their share of the general population, and the War on Drugs accounts for the lion’s share of the difference. Despite the fact that the incidence of drug use and drug sales are about the same among whites as they are among people of color, “In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men.”

Alexander demonstrates, step by careful step, how this happened, starting in 1982 with Ronald Reagan’s announcement of the War on Drugs. First, legislation proposed and passed by the same politicians (Democrats as well as Republicans) who opposed the civil rights movement) elevated drug offenses far above their previous levels — beginning three years before the introduction of crack cocaine and a nationwide increase in drug use. Next, state and local police have been granted significant financial incentives to arrest large numbers of drug users (not, as TV and film presentations might suggest, “drug kingpins”) and insulated from charges of racism in targeting drug use in inner cities rather than in neighborhoods largely populated by whites. Prosecutors as well as police have been given free rein by a series of Supreme Court decisions to operate as they will, in the absence of any legal representation for the accused, and to justify their actions (such as excluding blacks or Latinos from juries or overcharging to force plea-bargain confessions) using even completely absurd or “silly” reasons. (Don’t believe this? Read the book!) “Almost no one ever goes to trial. Nearly all criminal cases are resolved through plea bargaining.” Those few who do go on trial frequently face all-white juries and sentencing rules hemmed in by federal legislation that requires judges to impose the harshest possible sentences — even a life sentence for a first-time offense!

Simply possessing modest amounts of marijuana has turned millions of Americans into felons serving years in federal penitentiaries, barred for life from voting or serving on juries, shamed by their families, forced to pay fees for their own parole or probation (including drug tests), excluded from public housing, and discriminated against by most employers. Is it any wonder so many return to prison?

Alexander’s thesis is brutally simple: “Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.” And we all pay the price.

1493: When the Old World met the New, and nothing was ever the same

A review of 1493: Uncvovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann

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Chances are, you’re aware that the potato originated in Peru and smallpox in Africa, and that both species crossed the Atlantic shortly after Columbus. You probably know, too, that the potato later became a staple in many European countries and that smallpox decimated the native population of the Americas. However, what you may not know is how profound was the impact on the course of history of the exchange of animals, plants, minerals, and microorganisms from the Old World to and from the New.

Historians call this phenomenon the Columbian Exchange. Writing in 1493, Charles C. Mann refers to it as a turning-point equally as profound as the development of agriculture. One after another, this brilliant book brushes away a host of cherished myths that have grown up in the shadows of history.

Consider:

• The Columbian Exchange was by no means limited to commerce between Europe and the Americas. It was a truly global phenomenon, with far-reaching effects in Asia and Africa as well. Mann refers to the era ushered in by the Columbian Exchange as the “Homogenocene” — a new phase in human history when globalization became a reality and the world we share became increasingly homogenized.
• Though the Conquistadors’ search for gold was largely frustrated, their discovery of a mountain of silver in Bolivia led to Spain’s flooding the world with so much of this metal that it eventually wrecked the economies of both Europe and China.
• When Europeans sailed westward to colonize the New World, the native population was huge. For example, the Eastern seaboard of North America was more densely populated than Western Europe. Diseases inadvertently introduced from Europe and Africa reduced the population by half or more within the first few decades.
• Most Americans think of the westward movement of people as a European phenomenon. It was, in fact, predominantly African. Africans, transported over the sea as slaves, outnumbered European colonists by huge ratios. Not until the 19th Century, when the Irish potato famine and political upheaval across Europe produced mass emigration to the Americas, did the ethnic balance tip.

These are just a few of the eye-opening themes Charles Mann develops so ably in 1493. If you have even a passing interest in how the world got to be the way it is, read this book.

“Turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide”

A review of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

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“. . . more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely  because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine ‘gendercide’ in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.”

These shocking facts are the basis on which Kristof and WuDunn build their case for a new global movement to gain equality for women. Half the Sky is not journalism in the mode of The New York Times, which once employed both the authors and still  runs Kristof’s twice-weekly column, but a self-professed and passionate work of advocacy.

Kristof and WuDunn expose the terrifying reality of the sex slave trade, maternal mortality, and female genital cutting, and the tragedy of education denied to girls, not in the abstract but through the eyes of women and girls they have interviewed and in many cases come to know intimately through extensive travels to some of the most godforsaken places on earth. They have long since learned the lesson that stories of individual human beings are far more effective in conveying harsh realities than any table of statistics. The result is a powerful book crammed with unforgettable characters.

But Half the Sky is a hopeful book. The most compelling tales told in its pages are those of the heroic women and girls who have refused to tolerate their lot: the illiterate rural woman who now teaches surgery to credentialed graduate surgeons in Ethiopia, the Illinois woman who moved to Senegal and found an effective way to dramatically reduce female genital cutting, the upper-caste Indian woman who is saving hundreds of girls from sex slavery. These are today’s heroes, the avatars of a new worldwide movement — not a women’s movement, the authors insist, but a universal movement to claim for all of humanity the rights to life and liberty that so many of us take for granted.

“Decades from now,” write Kristof and WuDunn, “people will look back and wonder how societies could have acquiesced in a sex slave trade in the twenty-first century that . . . is bigger than the transatlantic slave trade was in the nineteeth. . . They will be perplexed that we shrugged as a lack of investment in maternal health caused half a million women to perish in childbirth each year.”

For the reader who is sufficiently motivated to take action, Half the Sky includes an extensive list of organizations that are actively engaged in addressing these compelling issues. And it’s tough to read this book from beginning to end without feeling that need.

ISBN-10: 0307267148

ISBN-13: 978-0307267146

ASIN: B002MHOCTO