Now and then a book comes along that might in time touch the public and educate social commentators, policymakers, and politicians about a glaring wrong that we have been living with that we also somehow don't know how to face. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander is such a work. A former director of the Racial Justice Project at the Northern California ACLU, now a professor at the Ohio State University law school, Alexander considers the evidence and concludes that our prison system is a unique form of social control, much like slavery and Jim Crow, the systems it has replaced.

Alexander is not the first to offer this bitter analysis, but The New Jim Crow is striking in the intelligence of her ideas, her powers of summary, and the force of her writing. Her tone is disarming throughout; she speaks as a concerned citizen, not as an expert, though she is one. She can make the abstract concrete, as J. Saunders Redding once said in praise of W.E.B. Du Bois, and Alexander deserves to be compared to Du Bois in her ability to distill and lay out as mighty human drama a complex argument and history.

 
"Laws prohibiting the use and sale of drugs are facially race neutral," she writes, "but they are enforced in a highly discriminatory fashion." To cite just one example of such discrimination, whites who use powder cocaine are often dealt with mildly. Blacks who use crack cocaine are often subject to many years in prison:

 
The decision to wage the drug war primarily in black and brown communities rather than white ones and to target African Americans but not whites on freeways and train stations has had precisely the same effect as the literacy and poll taxes of an earlier era. A facially race-neutral system of laws has operated to create a racial caste system.

 
Alexander argues that racial profiling is a gateway into this system of "racial stigmatization and permanent marginalization." To have been in prison excludes many people of color permanently from the mainstream economy, because former prisoners are trapped in an "underworld of legalized discrimination." The "racial isolation" of the ghetto poor makes them vulnerable in the futile war on drugs. Alexander cites a 2002 study conducted in Seattle that found that the police ignored the open-air activities of white drug dealers and went after black crack dealers in one area instead.

 
Even though Seattle's drug war tactics might be in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court has made it nearly impossible to challenge race discrimination in the criminal justice system. "The barriers" to effective lawsuits are so high, Alexander writes, that few "are even filed, notwithstanding shocking and indefensible racial disparities."

 
The Supreme Court, Alexander asserts, has given the police license to discriminate. Police officers then find it easy to claim that race was not the only factor in a stop and search. A study conducted in New Jersey exposed the absurdity of racial profiling: "Although whites were more likely to be guilty of carrying drugs, they were far less likely to be viewed as suspicious." Alexander notes that in the beginning police and prosecutors did not want the war on drugs. But it soon became clear that the financial incentives were too great to ignore. Consequently, the civil rights movement's strategies for racial justice are inadequate, Alexander says. Affirmative action cannot help those at the bottom. Black people must seek new allies and address the mass incarceration of blacks as a human rights issue.

 
Blacks, Alexander shows, have made up a disproportionate amount of the prison population since the US first had jails, and race has always influenced the administration of justice in America. The police have always been biased and every drug war in the country's history has been aimed at minorities. The tactics of mass incarceration are not new or original, but the war on drugs has given rise to a system that governs "entire communities of color." In the ghetto, Alexander continues, everyone is either directly or indirectly subjected to the new caste system that has emerged. She is most eloquent when describing the psychological effects on individuals, families, and neighborhoods of the shame and humiliation of prison:

The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer concerned primarily with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed. 
 

from "Invisible Black America" (a review of The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Race, Class and Crime in America and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness in The New York Review of Books, March 10, 2011)