In Which A Provocative Headline Clumsily Tries To Reel People In . . .

The most frustrating thing about Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow isn't the overwrought title — mass incarceration in the era of the War on Drugs has a lot of layers of bad but it just doesn't seem as bad as the Jim Crow era was described; the title kind of hangs over you as you read the book and distracts (sort of like a bad headline). What's more frustrating is that the bad policies, blunt-force military-style, stat-driven policing and prosecutorial overreach that Alexander describes are all things that people of various political backgrounds decry; there are opportunities to make common cause if people bothered to listen.

I came away from Crow thinking that the drug laws and various liberties afforded to the police and especially prosecutors were ill-conceived, full of unintended consequences (Alexander almost argues differently, thus the title) and applied badly — and the people affected the most are on the margins of society, which is a good enough reason to revisit those laws. This is an important distinction: you don't want the logical conclusion of all this to simply apply the same laws/procedures equally across the board — it's shitty policy because it's shitty policy and it's made worse because it also happens to disproportionately affect the most marginalized populations. (This also provides an out for the Civil Rights entities which, as Alexander writes, have been hesitant to pivot to this issue.)

Alexander spends a lot of time showing how the police and prosecutors in the legal system creatively exploit their powers to arrest and lock up African Americans. I think she's giving the lawmakers a huge pass. Cops and attorneys have a job to do, and will do what it takes to do their jobs well. But they don't set the policies or write the laws. They're performing in the way they're expected, as aggressively and effectively as possible.

Something confounding is how Alexander seems to rhetorically treat drug crimes as simply a matter of a younger man being stopped and frisked and having a joint in his pocket and then going to jail. She seems to avoid the violence surrounding the drug trade and all the other neighborhood-destroying elements of drugs (there's an extended portion about how the War on Drugs predated an actual drug problem; this part seems thin). I don't think a joint should mean that one loses his right to vote, but then you're getting into just whether the laws (and application thereof) are too draconian. At some point I also wondered whether it was too much to ask that someone simply not use drugs; as long as society/lawmakers believe that drug users should go to jail, isn't it reasonable to expect someone to follow the law?