![]() ![]() ![]() This review underscores these dynamics with respect to the criminalization of black Americans and highlights key national and municipal developments in crime-control practices and punitive policymaking that most affected black communities. In addition to reinterpreting Alexander's work, their insights have demonstrated the significance of federal and local crime-control policies, the role of police, and activism within black communities that both shaped and resisted the expansion of the US carceral-security state. More importantly, they offer rich historical knowledge for future interdisciplinary scholarship on law, law enforcement, and criminalization in the United States.įor more than a decade, carceral scholars have complicated traditional understandings of the social, economic, and political forces that undergirded the rise of mass incarceration in America. ![]() These histories of the antiblack punitive tradition in the United States provide necessary context that advances our understanding of the intersecting and distinctive racial, ethnic, gendered, and socioeconomic dimensions of policing and punishment in the American criminal legal system. Inspired in large part by Michelle Alexander as well as by Heather Ann Thompson's groundbreaking 2010 essay, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History”-published just a few months after The New Jim Crow’s release-historians of the American carceral state have produced a burgeoning wave of literature on criminalization, law enforcement, and imprisonment in America from the eras of slavery and settler colonialism to the modern age of mass incarceration and global counterinsurgency ( Balto 2019, Felker-Kantor 2018, Flowe 2020, Haley 2016, Hernández 2017, Hinton 2016, Kohler-Hausmann 2017, LeFlouria 2015, Muhammad 2010, Schrader 2019, Singh 2017, Suddler 2019, Thompson 2010). And as a call to action for rethinking the place of prisons in American society, The New Jim Crow stimulated new and critical scholarly debates over the impact of legalized racial and social control in America ( Forman 2012). Within the policy arena, the growing mandate for criminal justice reforms that emerged during the Obama administration-including the decarceration of nonviolent drug offenders, community-oriented policing reforms, and the emphasis on comprehensive prison reentry and youth violence prevention programs-can be partly attributed to the influence of Alexander's ideas. As a concept, the new Jim Crow has become shorthand for many anticarceral activists to describe the deep racial dimensions of criminalization and incarceration in the American criminal legal system. Over the past decade, The New Jim Crow has forced policymakers, scholars, and the public to confront the problem of mass incarceration in important new ways. ![]() Alexander is commonly credited for popularizing the premise that over the past half-century in America, mass incarceration has functioned as “a new racial caste system,” fueled by a calculated and seemingly colorblind system of disenfranchisement, destruction, and death ( Alexander 2010, p. Although Alexander did not invent the concepts of mass imprisonment or the prison-industrial complex, her book reinforced the groundbreaking work of scholars such as David Garland (2002), Angela Davis (2003), Bruce Western (2006), Jonathan Simon (2006), Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007), and Loïc Wacquant (2009). Michelle Alexander's bestselling book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Era of Colorblindness, published in 2010, is the most widely read text on the American criminal justice system ever published. ![]()
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