Editor's note: Listen to the two-part audio podcast of this interview here and here. Preview the book, The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander here. (This interview was trasncribed by Peter Zerner.)

PA: What inspired you to undertake your investigation of the mass incarceration of people of color in the United States?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: I was deeply concerned about the lack of attention being paid to mass incarceration in communities of color by traditional civil rights organizations and African American leaders. I myself didn’t fully appreciate the magnitude of the harm caused by the war on drugs and mass incarceration until I began working in communities of color representing victims of racial profiling and police brutality, and working with people who were struggling to “re-enter” society after being branded a felon. I had a series of experiences working on behalf of people struggling within the new caste system before I had my awakening, and, once I did, I began to see and understand, and to listen more carefully to the stories of the people who are cycling in and out of the criminal justice system. I then began a journey of research and study, of trying to understand better what was actually happening in ghetto communities as a result of our criminal justice policies, and what I found astounded me. Today there are more African Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the Civil War began. There are more African Americans disenfranchised today than in 1870, the year the 15th Amendment was ratified explicitly prohibiting laws that deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

In major American cities today, cities like Chicago, the majority of working age African American men have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to public education, and food stamps. So many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind are suddenly legal again once you’ve been branded a felon. So really quite belatedly I came to see that despite all the fanfare over the election of Barack Obama and our so-called color blind society, we have not ended racial caste in America – we’ve merely redesigned it – and the relative silence, the eerie quiet from the civil rights community, including folks like me, who, as I said, didn’t get it at first and African American leaders motivated me to write this book. It’s an effort to kind of ring the alarm bell, which has been rung by others before, but I fear has not been rung loudly enough. It is my hope to spark more discussion and dialogue and hopefully contribute to the building of a mass movement to end mass incarceration.

PA: Your title, The New Jim Crow, suggests a systematic implementation of this caste system, as you call it. What do you see as the relationship between the purpose and function of the old Jim Crow and this new system?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: As I describe in the book, I believe that every caste system in the United States has been deeply linked to the economic structure of our society at the time. Slavery was primarily a system of exploitation where black labor was stolen for profit. Jim Crow was a system primarily of subordination, in which African Americans were permanently locked into a lower tier of jobs, unable to compete or obtain the skills necessary to obtain higher-status jobs and higher-wage jobs. But mass incarceration isn’t primarily about exploitation or subordination, it’s about marginalization and elimination, the disposal of a group of people who are no longer viewed as essential to the functioning of our economy. Now that we have transitioned from a more agrarian economy to an industrial one, to what is now a globalized service-based economy, unskilled black labor is no longer viewed as essential to the functioning of the US economy – it’s no longer needed to pick cotton in the fields or labor in factories. African American men, and increasingly Latinos, are rounded up in droves and warehoused, put in cages.

As I discuss a fair amount in the book, the war on drugs really could not have come at a worse time for the African American community. At the time the war on drugs was declared, inner city black communities across the United States were suffering from economic collapse as a result of the disappearance of industrial jobs from urban centers across America. As recently as 1970 in cities like Chicago, about 70 percent of Black men had industrial employment. By the early and mid-1980s, as the drug war was kicking off, that figure had plummeted to below 30 percent. So hundreds of thousands of people were suddenly out of work as factories closed down and moved overseas. We could have responded to this crisis in our inner city communities – and so many of these factories had been located in the inner cities in order to have quick access to cheap black labor. We could have responded to this crisis with an outpouring of support. Stimulus packages and bailout plans could have been devised to help ensure that black youth in particular would have been able to make the rough transition from an industrial to a service-based economy, but no – instead we ended welfare as we knew it and declared the war on drugs.

PA: You mention the role of major economic shifts. Another thing that was happening in the 1990s was a decline in state budgets and a push for privatization, even of prisons. What is the role of the profit motive and its impact on the rise of this new era of Jim Crow?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: I do not believe that the get tough movement and the war on drugs itself was inspired by profit motives. Quite the contrary, I think the war on drugs and the get tough movement were traceable to racial politics. The war on drugs was launched in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan at a time when drug crime was actually on the decline, not on the rise. It was an effort 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, especially busing, desegregation and affirmative action. Those racial politics gave birth to mass incarceration.

Now it became readily apparent to many that large profits could be made from caging human beings, and so there are of course the private prison corporations that are listed on the New York Stock Exchange and profit quite directly from mass incarceration. But there is are also a whole host of other corporate interests that benefit from warehousing millions of people behind bars – corporations like AT&T that gouge prisoners families in the rates charged to call people behind bars. There are the private health care providers who provide typically abysmal health care but make millions of dollars providing that care to prisoners. There are the manufacturers of taser guns and all of the military-like equipment that is provided not only to prison personnel but also to law enforcement, those charged with waging this literal war against communities of color. Then there are the prison guard unions. Prison guard unions have become the largest and most powerful political lobbying organizations in many states, and they don’t lobby just for higher wages, they also lobby for three-strike laws and harsh mandatory minimum drug sentences. Because as long as there is a high demand for their services, they are guaranteed employment and good pay. So there is a wide array of individuals, organizations, and corporate interests that now benefit financially from this system of control and can be counted on to resist quite fiercely any significant downsizing of this system.

As you mentioned, states are facing budget crises, and we are seeing some moves to release some nonviolent offenders early and that sort of thing. I think we will see what has been consistent growth in the prison system leveling off and in some places declining a bit. But if we were to return the rates of incarceration we had just back in the 1970s, at a time when many civil rights organizations thought that rates of incarceration were just egregiously high, if we were just to go back to the bad old days of the 1970s, we would have to release 4-out-of-5 people who are in prison today. More than a million people employed by the criminal justice system would lose their jobs, and many rural communities that now host large prisons would be especially hard hit. So in building a movement to end mass incarceration, we have to take into account the wide range of interests that would be affected and insure that people who are living in rural communities are given the opportunity to have decent jobs and aren’t left jobless in the transition away from mass incarceration, so that they are turned into allies rather than adversaries in the process of ending caste in America.

PA: You mentioned the impact of mass incarceration on African American working families and workers as a way of marginalizing them, as well as the massive amount of public tax dollars spent on warehousing prisoners. What about the exploitation of prison labor? Is that still an issue today?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: It definitely is still an issue, but I don’t want to mislead people into thinking that in most prisons prisoners are laboring away for corporations for profit. The typical experience of someone in prison is idleness, which I think in many ways is even worse than having the opportunity to do something with yourself during the day. So while I think it is unconscionable that there are corporations who are avoiding paying minimum wage, providing decent benefits, and all of that by employing prison labor, the experience of being behind bars, locked in a cage day after day and absolutely idle – so many people find themselves in solitary confinement for large stretches things like insubordination to a prison guard – that form of suffering, I think, is as bad or worse than being required to labor without pay.

PA: What happens to a person in society when they have been marked as a convict or having had some other interaction with the criminal justice system?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Often someone is branded a felon even for a crime as minor as being caught with marijuana – which is a felony in most states or at least can be charged as a felony. Prosecutors frequently have the discretion to charge drug possession as either a misdemeanor or as a felony, and prosecutors exercise that discretion in a racially-biased manner. Then when you are released from prison with a relatively minor, nonviolent felony or drug offense, you are subject to a whole host of legalized discrimination that mirrors in remarkable ways the forms of discrimination that were legal during Jim Crow.

The most obvious is denial of the right to vote. Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia deny prisoners the right to vote, but that is just the tip of the iceberg, because once you are released from prison you may be denied the right to vote for a period of years or the rest of your life. Nationwide about one-in-seven or eight African Americans are denied the right to vote permanently or temporarily, and in some states the rate is as high as one-in-three or four Black men. Most people think it is normal to deny the right to vote to people in prison, but in most Western democracies prisoners are encouraged to vote, and every effort is made to insure that they have the opportunity to vote, but not here in the United States. In other democracies it is unheard of for people to be denied the right to vote once they are released from prison. But again the mentality here in the United States is that once you have committed a crime you may forfeit your right to vote for the rest of your life.

Felons are deemed ineligible for jury service. As a result, all-white juries have made a roaring comeback in many areas in the country, where a third or more of African American men have felonies and are deemed ineligible for jury service. But it is worse than that – because anyone who has ever had a negative experience with law enforcement can be stricken from a jury for cause, on the grounds that they are unlikely to be fair and impartial in a criminal case. So good luck finding someone in a poor community of color, in a poor Black community, who has not yet had a negative experience with law enforcement to justify their exclusion from a jury for cause.

There is denial of the right to vote, exclusion from juries, and legalized discrimination in employment. It is perfectly legal to discriminate against people with criminal records in employment. Virtually every application has a box you have to check if you have ever been convicted of a felony. It doesn’t matter if your felony happened yesterday, last week, or 30 years ago, for the rest of your life you have to check that box, virtually guaranteeing that your application will be thrown in the trash. Studies have shown that about 70 percent of employers won’t even consider hiring a drug felon, never mind that most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime. But if you are caught and you have that “F”, that felony label, your hopes of getting employment diminish to the vanishing point.

Housing discrimination is perfectly legal in both public and private housing markets. In fact, if you are branded a felon you are barred from public housing for a minimum of 5 years, and HUD regulations encourage discrimination against people with criminal records for their entire lives. If you are released from prison and stay with a family member in public housing, they risk eviction, the whole family risks eviction, as a result of having a “criminal” staying with them. Growing numbers of homeless shelters also screen for criminal convictions.

Here you are, newly released from prison, with no job, no housing – you can’t even stay with your relatives in public housing – so what are you expected to do? Well, if you’ve been convicted of a drug felony don’t expect to get food stamps, because thanks to President Clinton people convicted of drug felonies are barred from food stamps for the rest of their lives. They are permanently ineligible for food stamps – pregnant women, people with HIV and AIDS, not even food stamps are available to you. So what are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to feed yourself? What you are expected to do typically is to pay back thousands of dollars in fees, fines, court costs, and accumulated back child support. In a growing number of states you are actually expected to pay back the cost of your imprisonment. People released from prison are saddled with thousands of dollars in debt, and then up to 100 percent of their wages can be garnished to pay back all these fees, fines, court costs and accumulated back child support, and the cost of their imprisonment.

So here you are, one of the lucky few who actually manage to get a job in the legal economy – and up to 100 percent of your wages can be garnished? What does the system seem designed to do? I argue it’s designed to send you right back to prison, which is what in fact happens about 70 percent of the time. About 70 percent of released prisoners return to jail within three years, and the majority of those who do return in a matter of months, because the challenges associated with just surviving on the outside are so immense.

Then, of course, there is the stigma as well. In many respects the stigma of being branded a criminal or a felon is as severe and damaging as the stigma of race during the Jim Crow era. Many people branded felons try to pass. During the Jim Crow area, light-skinned Blacks would try to pass as white to avoid the shame and stigma associated with race and all the forms of discrimination associated with race. Today people branded felons try to pass, not just by lying to employers or housing officials, or failing to check the box on loan applications, but by lying to their friends, family members and co-workers, trying to hide their criminal status because of the shame and stigma of having to admit, “Yeah, I did time, I was in prison for 5 years.” So this shame and stigma has created a real silence even in the communities hardest hit by mass incarceration, one that makes political action, collective political action to resist this new system of control, extremely difficult if not impossible.

PA: In your subtitle you use the term “color-blindness.” I think a lot of people want that word to be a positive word. You know, “If we’re just color blind we can get past these problems.” Why do you think that might be more harmful than positive?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Most people, it seems, now think that we as a nation have finally triumphed over race, particularly since the election of Barack Obama. There is a lot of talk about post-racialism and how most Americans are now color blind. Much of my book reveals that it isn’t the case that we are color blind. I argue that the goal should not be color blindness, that the goal of colorblindness is deeply misguided. It has the effect of making us blind not so much to race, but to the existence of racial bias and severe racial disparities and the suffering of people of other races. I argue that rather than aspiring to be color blind, we should aspire to see and appreciate people of all colors, recognize potential differences, cultural differences, racial differences, to see each other as we are but still care for one another.

The problem isn’t seeing race, it’s failing to care as much for people of another race as we care for our own, and that, I believe, that failure to care, the indifference to the experience of people of other races, is what lies at the foundation of every caste system that has ever existed in the United States or anywhere else in the world. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke frequently about this, particularly near the end of his life, where he would remind audiences that slavery and Jim Crow were not systems supported primarily by racial hostility or open bigotry. Rather those systems emerged and endured because of so much indifference, so much indifference by most to the plight of people who were perceived as different, perceived as being fundamentally different than themselves. Colorblindness really is our enemy, and that we as a nation would be much better off if we openly talked about race, openly acknowledged race, and really strove to care more for people of other races.

PA: Finally, you hinted at the need for reinvigorating a reform movement, a civil rights movement that really looks closely at these issues. What do you see as drawbacks or problems with building that movement, and what do you see as possibilities and hopeful signs for building it?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Right now I think the biggest barriers to the building of that movement are silence and denial. As I mentioned earlier, there is a tremendous amount of silence about this system even in the communities most impacted. I think the major exception is in hip-hop music, which is one form of political expression that has been consistently critical of the role of our criminal justice system in poor communities of color. Hip-hop artists frequently express love, care and concern for people who are behind bars and recognize that their fathers, brothers, mothers, their loved ones, have been taken away and often brutally mistreated by this system, but that they still care and still feel deep connection to them, whether they have committed a crime or not. But in general in our society there is relatively little discussion about mass incarceration or the devastation caused by the drug war in communities of color. That silence absolutely has to be broken, and we must move out of denial.

I think one of the reasons we have been in such deep denial about the existence of racial caste in America is because, on the surface, on the shiny surface of things, it appears that we have made great progress. Affirmative action has allowed for a handful of African Americans to be sprinkled through elite universities and corporations and government as well, and this has created a veneer, the appearance of much more progress than has actually occurred, and masks the severity of racial inequality in this country.

It is also the case that the erasure of prisoners from poverty statistics and unemployment data also helps to mask the severity of the problem. If you take into account prisoners, the standard rate of black unemployment underestimates true black unemployment by as much as 24 percentage points. Whatever you read in the newspaper as the black unemployment rate today, you can add 15-20 percentage points to that figure to account for all the black people warehoused in prisons. Today the poverty rate and the unemployment rate is not better than it was in 1968 when Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were assassinated and cities across America lit up in flames. The unemployment rate is actually worse today than it was back then, rivaling third-world countries.

I think we have been in deep denial about the extent of racial progress that has been made, and the silence amongst those hardest hit has made it possible for us to ignore it. In building a movement I think the first and most important thing that must be done is consciousness-raising, truth-telling – and in the communities hardest hit by mass incarceration by encouraging people to move beyond the shame and stigma and break the silence, to do the healing that is necessary to bring these communities shattered by the drug war together, but also to have consciousness-raising among all those who claim to care about social, economic and racial justice in the United States. I find again and again that people like myself who have cared about social and racial justice are stunned when they actually see the data and learn how the US Supreme Court has granted license to law enforcement to create this new racial under-caste. We need to know the truth and break the silence, and then meaningful political action will be possible.

Photo: Michelle Alexander