Jim Crow 2.0

For anyone wanting to understand the relationship between social control, the criminal justice system, and race in the United States, this article on the website of Jacobin magazine (‘The Political Economy of Mass Incarceration’) provides a good overview of how the betrayal of Reconstruction begat the post-1970s culture of mass incarceration of African-Americans and other racial minorities. A couple of important historical lessons from the article:

• Reconstruction was about what would become of the South’s slave population, i.e. whether they would be simply wage labourers for their former owners or something else. The alliance between northern capital and southern planters (symbolised politically by the 1877 deal to hand, in the aftermath of a close and disputed presidential election, the White House to the Republicans in exchange for the Democrats re-establishing their hegemony in the South) condemned them to the former option.
• The post-Civil War southern state governments used the law to deny African-Americans the right to homestead land – a classic tactic for reducing people’s economic opportunities which has roots in the enclosures of medieval England and the Highland Clearances. The ally of the southern oligarchs in denying the freed slaves their proverbial ‘forty acres and a mule’ was…the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency set up ostensibly to advance the interests of said former slaves. (An early example of regulatory capture?)
• The regime of mass incarceration which dates back, like so many negative trends in American life, to the Nixon Administration has a similar purpose. Just as Reconstruction-era freedmen were prevented from engaging in economic activity outside the cotton plantation system, the disproportionate focus on drugs helps to take away a potential source of employment for inner-city African-Americans, forcing them into either the formal economy or into bureaucratic means of social control such as the welfare and prison systems.

A reader in the article’s comments section suggests that ninety percent of the revenue of the state of Alabama in the early twentieth century came from leasing convict labour to private employers. I’ll have to do some checking to verify this, but it is certainly true that the South has always had a culture of using prison labour. Lacking the religiously-inspired social reformism which drove campaigns for better prison conditions in the North, and lacking a strong union movement to stop the widespread undercutting of free labour by convictism, the region bore many similarities to early post-1788 Australia in its reliance on unfree labour, both as a means of driving down the cost of labour, and as a means of social control. The trend of privatised prisons is not, then, something which has only existed for the last few decades, but the nationalisation of a previously southern phenomenon.

Then, as now, new crimes were invented by those in power to keep disfavoured racial groups in line. The suite of legal restrictions imposed on Jim Crow-era southern blacks included those directly related to economics (such as laws favouring Big Cotton over small farmers), but also included restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms (something I discussed in my post on the Trayvon Martin shooting) and the right to marry a non-black person (until overturned in Loving v. Virginia). In addition, the South was the site of the heaviest applications of eugenics laws (the preponderance of which was one of the few things Adolf Hitler praised America for in Mein Kampf), and programs such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment added to the oppression, as well as demonstrate Washington’s complicity in the region’s racial caste system.

Why, then, does America continue to imprison racial minorities, particularly African-American males, at artificially high rates, despite the lack of a connection between these rates and actual crime or drug use figures? In a 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander blames decisions made regarding drug laws by a Supreme Court packed with Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Bush appointees. The Court has reinterpreted the Fourth Amendment so as to allow all sorts of searches, which are inevitably undertaken disproportionately against non-whites, and has reduced the Fourteenth’s Equal Protection Clause to covering only overt, explicit racial bias, rather than extending it to protect against gross inequality in the outcome of the application of a law. The system of mass incarceration, she argues, has been embedded in the country’s constitutional fabric the same way the slavery and Jim Crow were – by favourable SCOTUS decisions (Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson) and by bureaucracies (the Freedmen’s Bureau, the various state and federal prison systems) who seek to manage and control freedmen/underclass populations.