by Bill Moyers
You call your book The New Jim Crow. What’s the parallel between the old Jim Crow that Bryan has just described and the new Jim Crow that you describe in your book?
ALEXANDER: Well, just a couple decades after the collapse of the old Jim Crow system, a new system of racial control emerged in the United States. Today, people of color are targeted by law enforcement for relatively minor, nonviolent, often drug-related offenses. Those are the types of crimes that occur all the time on college campuses, where drug use is open and notorious, that occur in middle-class suburban communities without much notice.
People of color are targeted, often at very young ages, for relatively minor offenses. Arrested, branded felons, and then ushered into a parallel social universe, in which they can be denied the right to vote; they’re automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in many of the ways in which African Americans were discriminated against during the Jim Crow era. So when I say that we have a new racial caste system, what I mean is that we have a system of laws, policies, and practices in the United States today that operate to lock people of color, particularly poor people of color, living in ghetto communities, in an inferior second-class status for life.
Now, most people think the drug war was declared in response to rising drug crime or crime rates, but that is not the case. The current drug war was officially declared by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, a couple years before crack hit the streets and became a media sensation. The drug war was part of the Republican Party’s grand strategy, now known as the “southern strategy,” to use racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare in order to appeal to poor and working-class white voters who were resentful of and disaffected by many of the gains of the civil rights movement—folks who were upset by busing, desegregation, and affirmative action. The Republican Party strategists openly talked about the need to use racially coded political appeals on crime and welfare in order to get those voters who used to be part of the Democratic New Deal coalition to defect to the Republican Party.
You quote President Richard Nixon’s White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman: “The whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” But wasn’t there also an issue of punishing criminals and stopping crime?
STEVENSON: I think that’s where you have to really focus on what’s a crime, what’s a threat to public safety, and what’s something else. We’ve always had a commitment to stopping crime. People convicted and charged with violent crimes were always people who were going to be arrested and prosecuted. What’s interesting is that over the last thirty-five years, there haven’t been tremendous fluctuations in the violent crime rate in this country.
At the same time, we’ve gone from 300,000 people in jails and prison in 1972 to 2.3 million people in jails and prisons today, with nearly 5 million people on probation and parole. Most of that is explained by this so-called war on drugs. The point can’t be overstated that when we talk about challenging drug use, we’re not talking about challenging drug use throughout society. Because this is actually one crime area where there aren’t huge differences between black use and white use for illegal drugs. It’s about the same.
Black people are 13 percent of the population of this country. They’re about 14 percent of the drug users. However they end up being about 60 percent of the people sent to prison. You have to focus on these policies and the targeting. I think that what’s meant by these policies is that we didn’t have to incarcerate people for ten, twenty, thirty, forty years for drug use. We didn’t have to do that. We made choices around that.
And now the consequences are devastating. I think they’re not only devastating from a political perspective, but I think—this is the way I think it relates to Jim Crow as well—it’s also been devastating within communities of color. Right now, for black men in the United States, there’s a 32 percent chance you’re going to jail or prison.
In poor communities and minority communities, urban communities, rural communities, it could be 60 percent or 70 percent. Well, what does that do? You’re born, you’re a ten-year-old kid, there’s a 70 percent chance that you’re going to go to jail and prison. What does that do to you? And the heartbreaking thing for me when I work in communities like that is I see kids who are thirteen and fourteen who expect that they’re going to go to prison.
And they tell me, “Mr. Stevenson, don’t tell me about staying in school. I’ve got to go out here and get mine before I’m dead at eighteen or twenty-one or I’m sent to prison for the rest of my life.” This culture of despair is a function of this so-called war on drugs, that is also like Jim Crow, because it has actually diminished the aspirations and hopes of people of color in ways that actually contribute to these cycles of violence and destruction and hopelessness.
ALEXANDER: The enemy in this war is not drugs. The enemy has been defined in racial terms. Now, if we were to look for drugs as aggressively in suburban middle-class white communities as we do in ghetto communities, we would have those kinds of stunning figures in middle-class white communities as well. And as Bryan indicated, the rates of drug use are about the same among all racial groups. But also, and what many people don’t realize, is that the rates of drug sales are about the same among people of all different races.
This defies our racial stereotypes. When we think of a drug dealer, we think of a black kid standing on a street corner with his pants hanging down, right? Well, drug dealing certainly happens in the ghetto, but it happens everywhere else in America as well. A white kid in Nebraska doesn’t get his marijuana or his meth by driving to the ’hood to get it. No, he gets it from a friend, a classmate, a co-worker who lives down the road.
Why is it that the burden, then, falls hardest on the people you’ve described—young black men in the inner cities?
ALEXANDER: There are a number of reasons. First, the enemy was defined politically as black and brown. For political reasons. It was part of the Republican Party’s effort to prove they were getting tough on them, the people that many poor and working-class whites had come to believe were taking their jobs and disrupting their lives through the social upheaval brought by the civil rights movement. The Reagan administration actually hired staff whose job it was to publicize crack babies, crack dealers in inner-city communities, in the hope that these images would build public support for the drug war and persuade Congress to devote millions of more dollars to the war.
This converted the war from a rhetorical one into a literal one. It was part of a larger political strategy. And once the media became saturated and our public consciousness began to associate drug use and drug crime with African Americans, it’s no surprise that law enforcement efforts became concentrated in communities defined by race as well.
STEVENSON: The reality is that, in poor communities, the police do raids all the time. I’ve worked in communities where the SWAT team comes and they put up a screen fence around the public housing project. They do searches. They stop people coming in and out. There are these presumptions of criminality that follow young men of color.
When they’re someplace others think they don’t belong, they’re stopped and they’re targeted. And so, because you don’t have the resources actually to create privacy and security, you’re much more vulnerable to prosecution. As Michelle said, middle-class communities, elite schools in this country would not tolerate drug raids from federal law enforcement officers and police even if there’s illegal drug use.
There is this way in which resources and economic status actually make you more vulnerable to criminal arrest and prosecution. It becomes a selffulfilling story. So that when I walk down the street in the wrong kinds of clothes, if I’m in the “wrong place,” there’s a presumption that I’m up to something criminal.
And that means that a police officer being very rational, not necessarily being overtly racist, has an interest in me and a concern about me that he’s going to follow up on. And a lo
t of these things are not willful or intentional. But we have so embraced this image, this notion, this narrative about black criminality and drug use and all that sort of thing, we almost unconsciously accept that, yes, that person looks like a drug dealer.
In your book, you used the metaphor of the birdcage to describe what Bryan is talking about. Talk about that.
ALEXANDER: Academics have a tendency to use terms like “structural racism” to explain how people of color are trapped kind of at the bottom. But one way of thinking about these forms of structural disadvantage is to think about it as a birdcage. Not every wire of the cage needs to be intentionally designed to keep the bird trapped, right? Now, the rules and laws that exist today, the drug laws and the ways in which they’re enforced, all of the forms of discrimination that people who have been branded felons now face, all the forms of legal discrimination against them are wires of the cage that serve to keep people of color trapped in an inferior, second-class status. As Bryan suggested, not every law or policy has to be adopted with discriminatory intent in order for it to function as part of a larger, and in this case literal, cage for black people.
There are people who are going to disagree with you, of course. And they’re going to say, “Look, there was a great deal of concern back in the ’60s and early ’70s with law and order. ‘Lock them up’ became a way to deal with crime.” And they will say today that prisons actually work because as the prison population goes up, the crime rate has been dropping.
STEVENSON: But that would not be accurate. That is, we had huge prison growth between 1984 and 1991, and the crime rate actually increased. It’s interesting. The states that have had the lowest rates of incarceration growth have actually had the greatest rates of reduction of crime. So I don’t know that we can simply say that, yes, because we have this huge prison population there’s been a decrease in crime.
No one disputes that there are things that threaten public safety. Violent crimes have to be managed with some intervention. But what we’re talking about here is a huge increase in the prison population, say, for marijuana possession, around things like using illegal drugs. Most of these crimes are not violent crimes. My state has a three-strikes law where you can be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for four felony convictions.
I represented a man who stole a bicycle worth $16 after being convicted of public urination, stealing a transistor radio, and stealing a hand tool from a hardware store. He got life without parole. A Vietnam vet I represented had three marijuana possession convictions. The fourth conviction, he got life without parole. These cases do not reflect the debate about law and order. I don’t think it’s about that. It’s more about control and this kind of use of the politics of fear and anger as a way of empowering some and disempowering others.
Are most of those people who get life imprisonment African Americans?
STEVENSON: Yes. About two-thirds of the people in our state prison system are people of color. There are complexities to this, and I don’t want to understate the complexities. We have a criminal justice system that’s very wealth-sensitive. Our system treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.
Poor people brought into the criminal justice system, who don’t have the means for good legal representation, who don’t have the resources to protect themselves, who can’t afford to pay the fees for getting into drug court and avoiding jails and prisons, are going to fare worse than people who do have those resources. That’s a function of the criminal justice system. But now we see these incredibly troubling race effects. The federal government has created a sentencing scheme for crack cocaine versus powder cocaine that has been devastating to people of color. We sentence a hundred times to one.
And Bill Clinton signed that law, by the way. It’s not just Republicans whose fingerprints are on this.
STEVENSON: That’s exactly right. In 1996, President Clinton signed a provision in the Welfare Reform Act that bans people with drug convictions from public housing and public benefits and food stamps. Women with children have been devastated by that, and that was a policy signed by a Democratic president. What I mean by failure, though, and our failure, our inability to recognize it, is that we now know that this has been horrific. In my state, 31 percent of the black male population has permanently lost the right to vote as a result of felony convictions. Yet we are unwilling to talk about that, even as we celebrate the Selma-to-Montgomery march, even as we talk about the Voting Rights Act as this great period in American revelation around race consciousness. The projection is that in a few years we’re actually going to have a higher level of disenfranchisement among African American men than existed at the time of the Voting Rights Act. Most politicians wouldn’t concede that having a third of the black male population in prison is a bad thing. And that’s what I mean by failure.
Your passion is the abolition of capital punishment. Although each case is horrendous in its own right, relatively few people are affected by capital punishment. Why is it that capital punishment has become so symbolic of what you see as the crisis in American justice and American life?
STEVENSON: Several things. It shapes all criminal justice policy. It’s only in a country where you have the death penalty that you can have life without parole for somebody who writes bad checks and for somebody else who steals a bicycle. It shapes the way we think about punishment. We’ve gotten very comfortable with really harsh and excessive sentences. And I think the death penalty permits that. We’ve had 130 people in this country who’ve been exonerated, proved innocent, who were on death row. For every eight people who have been executed, we’ve identified one innocent person. If we will tolerate that kind of error rate in the death penalty context, it reveals a whole lot about the rest of our criminal justice system and about the rest of our society.
There was a death penalty case that went to the Supreme Court, McCleskey v. Kemp. You used this as an example of our tolerance of failure.
STEVENSON: The case involved an African American who was accused of killing a white police officer in Atlanta, Georgia. And the history is that in 1972, in Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court said that the death penalty is arbitrary, in part because it is so racially biased. They noted that 87 percent of the people executed in this country for rape were black men convicted of raping white women. But they didn’t say it’s cruel and unusual punishment. So the Court says, “We’re not going to presume bias and discrimination in the death penalty until you prove it to us.” McCleskey comes back in 1987 and says, “Here’s the evidence, here’s your proof.” And I think the devastating thing about the opinion is that they said that these kinds of disparities based on race are inevitable.
Inevitable?
STEVENSON: Inevitable. I’m a product of Brown v. Board of Education. Grew up in a community where black kids couldn’t go to the public schools. I remember when the lawyers came into our community and made the public schools accessible to me. I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you but for that intervention. And the difference between Brown and McCleskey can’t really be defined or explained by jurisprudence. It’s defined and explained by this hopelessness that we have projected onto this community.
ALEXANDER: McClesky v. Kemp has immunized the criminal justice system from judicial scrutiny for racial bias. It has made it virtually impossible to challenge any aspect of the criminal justice process for racial bias in the absence of proof of intentional discrimination—conscious, deliberate bias. Now, that’s the very type of evidence that is nearly impossible to come by today, when people know not to say, “The reason I stopped him was because he was black. The reason I sought the death penalty was because he was black.” People know better than to say that they are recommending higher sentences or harsher punishment for someone because of their race.
So evidence of conscious, intentional bias is almost impossible to come by in the absence of some kind of admission. But the U.S. Supreme Court has said that the courthouse doors are
closed to claims of racial bias in the absence of that kind of evidence, which has really immunized the entire criminal justice system from judicial and to a large extent public scrutiny of the severe racial disparities and forms of racial discrimination that go on every day, unchecked by our courts and our legal process.
STEVENSON: I argue cases at the Supreme Court. And every time I go there, I have this little ritual. I stand outside the Court. I read where it says, “Equal justice under law.” I have to believe that to make sense of what I do. And this decision essentially said, “There will be no equal justice under law.”
It seems to me your book boils down to this: mass imprisonment, mass incarceration constitutes a racial caste system, and the entrance to this new caste system can be found at the prison gate. Is that what you mean by that metaphor?
ALEXANDER: Absolutely. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate, because that is when you are branded. Once you are branded a felon, your life as you knew it before is over. All the forms of discrimination that are illegal for the rest of the country now can be practiced against you with impunity.
I think it’s important to recognize, though, that there are white people who have been harmed by the drug war. There are white families, particularly poor white families, that have been shattered by the incarceration of loved ones. The drug war was declared with black folks in mind, and mass incarceration as we know it would not exist but for the racialization of crime in the media and in our political discourse. But just because African Americans have been the target of this war doesn’t mean that people of all colors haven’t suffered as a result.
