WALTERS & MURRAY: THE NEW JIM CROW REVISITED
After John Walters wrote a Weekly Standard article on President Obama’s commutations of incarcerated drug offenders, I asked him to take a look at Michelle Alexander’s dreadful but influential book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. I noted the Walters article and discussed Alexander’s book in the post “Meet the new Jim Crow, same as the old BS.”
Now Mr. Walters has turned his attention to Alexander’s book. Together with his Hudson Institute colleague David Murray, he has written the important essay below on the book. The essay will be posted in footnoted form on the Hudson Institute site this Wednesday. In the meantime, we are pleased to present this essay that fills a gap in the literature on the controversy over “mass incarceration.” Walters and Murray write:
This book (hereafter, TNJC) is careless. The carelessness produces misdirection and it undermines the argument. Facts are stretched, the scholarly apparatus is weak, and the core argument is often contradicted by its own evidence.
Nonetheless, TNJC is a very popular book—rising to The New York Times best seller list, required reading for incoming students at Brown University, said by the San Francisco Chronicle to be “the Bible of a social movement.” Is its power rooted in a deeper truth or in a revealing lie that many of us want to believe or need to believe in the face of an ugly reality?
Full disclosure: We have lived through and remember the drug and crime problem of the 1980’s onward. We have done our best to make the problem smaller from positions within the White House, serving for at least a time in every Administration from Reagan to Obama. We know from personal experience that TNJC is built on falsehood. We also recognize that those who want to believe TNJC may view our experience as a cover-up of the great wrong alleged. But we write with the hope that open-minded readers can and will judge the facts for themselves.
In a nutshell, TNJC argues that “[w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” From the book jacket: “By targeting black men through the War on Drugs, and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to permanent second-class status.” A primary concern is the loss of the right to vote.
The specific list of factual misstatements is long. For a book with scholarly pretentions, it is noteworthy that the book lacks a bibliography, and that its endnote citations are woeful.
Consider that we are told: “The Reagan administration hired staff to publicize the emergence of crack cocaine in 1985 as part of a strategic effort to build public and legislative support for the war.” The point is not a minor one, since it is offered in support of a core thesis: when there really wasn’t a drug problem in our cities, in order to achieve “social control” over blacks through “mass incarceration,” President Ronald Reagan created and then hyped a crisis using the media. This claim is found in the Introduction. Turning to the endnote, however, one finds no documentation, but rather a simple line that Reagan’s action “is discussed in more depth in Chapter 1.”
That’s a bit cheesy, but what then happens in Chapter 1? There, after reading about “code words” for race, we find again that Reagan “launched a media offensive to justify the ‘War on Drugs.’” And there’s another endnote which, when pursued, leads nowhere. It is a reference to the 1992 National Drug Control Strategy—produced after the Reagan Presidency.
This is cat-and-mouse. It anticipates an unserious, unquestioning reader, one willing to be led.
What about the author’s claim that the “War on Drugs” was initiated by Reagan (detractors of Richard Nixon will be disappointed), or the even more dramatic claim that Reagan’s “ambitious federal policy” in fact turned into “an actual war.” How are we to take this hyperbole?
The author cites fears “in poor black communities that the War on Drugs was part of a genocidal plan by the government to destroy black people in the United States.” She calls these “conspiracy theories,” but what does the professor actually believe? She tells us: “While the conspiracy theories were initially dismissed as far-fetched, if not loony, the word on the street [i.e., genocide] turned out to be right, at least up to a point.”
To forward the concept of a policy being “genocide up to a point” (that point being the intent to kill a race and actually trying to do so) is such extreme overstatement it should be self-discrediting.
Still TNJC plunges forward. Evidence that the crack epidemic was “genocidal” is supposed to be be contained in the claim that “[t]he CIA admitted in 1998 that guerilla armies that it actively supported in Nicaragua were smuggling illegal drugs into the United States.” The CIA further “admitted that . . . it blocked law enforcement efforts to investigate illegal drug networks” funding its covert war.
Whatever the claimed involvement of the CIA, its actual significance—how much illegal drug supply this “conspiracy” dumped into American streets—is something the author tellingly declines to explain or quantify. If you are old enough to remember the Medellin and Cali cartels (which really did traffic massive amounts of cocaine into the United States during that period), you are supposed to forget them here.
Assumptions like these, in which every development suggests the existence of a full-scale “plot,” might incline us to dismissiveness when the author finally gets to actual data. Blacks are disproportionately incarcerated for drug crimes on a straight per-capita basis. That’s certainly true. But it’s not a phenomenon peculiar to drug statutes; blacks are incarcerated for (and, crucially, victims of) almost every Index crime at depressingly higher per capita rates.
Even though TNJC’s attack ostensibly focuses on drug laws, it’s argument ultimately embraces the whole of American criminal justice: it is all “a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions” that produces “mass incarceration” to achieve “social control.” Here, Ms. Alexander quotes Michael Tonry: “Governments decide how much punishment they want, and these decisions are in no way related to crime rates.”
But this claim that blacks are subordinated and controlled creates an obvious problem. TNJC must explain away the election of Barack Obama within a system allegedly dedicated to keeping blacks from power: “Many will wonder how a nation that just elected its first black president could have a racial caste system,” and “[i]t’s a fair question,” she acknowledges. Indeed, it is. But her answer is odd: “[T]here is no inconsistency whatsoever between the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land and the existence of a racial caste system in the era of colorblindness. The current system of control depends on black exceptionalism; it is not disproved or undermined by it.” We have no idea what exactly that’s supposed to mean, but it does seem to suggest that for America, where Ms. Alexander is concerned, it’s damned when you do—and double-damned when you don’t.
Caste or Conduct?
TNJC opens with a compelling anecdote about a man named Jarvious Cotton:
Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon, and is currently on parole.
The idea that the state of Mississippi, home to Jarvious Cotton, has deliberately designed its laws to create a systematic racial caste system would have been undeniable 50 years ago. But has there been no progress since? Yes, Mississippi continues to deny the ballot to any person convicted of “murder, rape, bribery, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretenses, perjury, forgery, embezzlement or bigamy.” If this is a caste system—unless you consider “murderer” and “arsonist” perfectly acceptable synonyms for “African American”—it’s an oddly leaky one.
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Note that the critical exhibit for TNJC, that blacks are disproportionately imprisoned for drug trafficking crimes that they don’t differentially commit, hinges on the slender reed of a 2006 body of self-report data from juveniles which shows no such thing.
This, as we say, is the book’s strongest case. Once we actually incorporate the reality of criminal conduct, however, the book descends into self-deceptions, more and more difficult to believe. In fact, its claims contradict our shared experience.
The author should acknowledge that great political pressure for tough law enforcement has come from black communities that suffer disproportionate victimization. It has come from the fears, and hopes, of mothers of sons at risk of death from gang involvement. This decisive truth about law enforcement in America is the real refutation of TNJC.
If you’re not troubled yet, you should be. The popularity of TNJC risks engendering a cycle of violent victimization of our most vulnerable citizens, who must depend on the criminal justice system to be their protector. The reality of black victimization requires us to strengthen, not condemn and abandon, institutions of law and order. TNJC makes telling the truth about our struggle on the streets an urgent duty.
The new students at Brown University, required to confront untrue charges that criminal justice in America is no more than an exercise in deliberate “mass incarceration,” should beware lest we fall prey to yet another “low, dishonest decade.”
John Walters and David W. Murray direct Hudson Institute’s Center for Substance Abuse Policy Research. They both served in the Office of National Drug Control Policy during the George W. Bush administration.
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