Mass Incarceration: The New Jim Crow
We were all taught in elementary or middle school: that slavery ended in the United States after the Civil War with the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution. But did it really? The amendment says, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime provides a convenient loophole that allows for prisoners to be used as slave labor for corporations looking to increase profits, leaving prisoners with mere cents per hour (if they get paid anything at all). And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
The U.S. houses 20% of the world’s prison population (by far the most of any country), despite making up only 4% of the world’s population.¹ Pew Research states that Black people account for 33% of the U.S. prison population but only 12% of the national adult population.² One out of every three black men born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime, compared to one in seventeen white men.³ Even if incarceration rates have gone down in the past years, the racial disparity is glaringly obvious. This is not because Black people have some sort of predisposition to crime. Instead, it’s the result of not only over-policing in Black neighborhoods, but also because Black people are more likely to get arrested, convicted, and receive on average harsher sentences than their white counterparts. This is due to the wide array of racial bias across the criminal justice system — everywhere from police to prosecutors. According to the United States Sentencing Commission, Black male offenders received sentences on average 19.1% longer than similarly-situated white male offenders.⁴
Even if some Black neighborhoods have higher rates of crime, this is directly correlated to the material conditions created by centuries of disfranchisement. Black people in America were subjected to the horrific conditions of slavery for generations, and when it was finally outlawed they received no reparations; in fact, the only people who received reparations were the slave owners themselves. Even past the outlawing of slavery, African-Americans were subject to Jim Crow Laws and were second-class citizens, still unable to accumulate any sort of wealth and often unable to escape poverty. During the New Deal era, where the government heavily subsidized housing (the reason why many middle-class white Americans are wealthy even today), discriminatory zoning practices known as redlining devalued primarily Black neighborhoods and made it near impossible for Black people to get the same loans and mortgages so easily accessible to white people. During Nixon’s War on Drugs, the legacy of which continues to prevail to this day, Black people were and continue to be more heavily penalized for drug use than their white counterparts. Or, in some cases, Black people were arrested without even possessing or consuming the drugs in question. Time and time again history shows us that the prevalence of poverty in predominantly African-American neighborhoods is no accident but rather the result of centuries of discriminatory practices, laws, and policies.
Besides incarcerated people (who as discussed are disproportionately African-American) being paid criminally low wages, well below minimum wage, while in prison, life once leaving prison is often as a second-class citizen. Almost half of the ex-prisoners report no earnings in the immediate aftermath of leaving prison, and those who do often earn an average of less than full-time minimum wage, just over $10,000 USD a year.⁵ This leaves prisoners stuck in a cycle of poverty, again forced to resort to crime in order to simply survive. Felons in some states do not even get the right to participate in our democracy and vote. While employers can no longer discriminate on the basis of race in the name of the law, they certainly can discriminate against felons — we have not abolished the racial caste system in America, simply reworded it.
So we are stuck in a cycle: Black people are more likely to grow up in poverty due to centuries of inequality and the lack of opportunity to acquire generational wealth and may resort to crime to survive. For such crimes, often petty theft or minor drug use, Black people are significantly likelier to go to jail and go to jail for longer. In jail, they are subjected to a cycle where they cannot acquire wealth or undergo rehabilitation (a process that does lower crime rates). They then leave jail and are often unable to find employment and make a living, forcing them to again turn towards crime in order to earn a survivable income. And so, the cycle of poverty and racial injustice continues.
This isn’t a “broken” system; this is a system doing exactly what it was designed to do: working not at the behest of the average American citizen, but for those who are white and more importantly for those who are wealthy. Racial equality without economic justice is simply equality in words and not action, and true economic equality cannot be achieved with Black people forced into a cycle of poverty because of our criminal justice system. It has become increasingly evident that there can be no racial justice without economic justice, and it is now blatant that there cannot be economic justice without criminal justice reform. We are eager to wash our hands of the rooted American history of racial inequality, insisting that it is a thing of the past. But without true systemic reform, without revising the fundamental principles our criminal justice system was built on, all we have managed to do is give Jim Crow Laws a new alias in our modern society: mass incarceration.
