Legal scholar Michelle Alexander new book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness says that although Jim Crow laws are off the books, millions of African Americans arrested for minor crimes remain marginalized and trapped by a criminal just system that has forever brand them as felons. She also further states that blacks have been denied basic rights and opportunities that would allow them to become productive, law-abiding citizens.

Author and legal scholar Michell Alexander

Jim Crow defined

The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern states of the former Confederacy, with a supposedly “separate but equal” status for black Americans.

The separation led to unfair and inferior accommodations and other services that compared to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States. Northern segregation was generally de facto, with patterns of segregation in housing enforced by covenants, bank-lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory union practices for decades.

Some examples of Jim Crow laws are the segregation of public schools, public places, and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains for whites and blacks. The U.S. military was also segregated.

Educational links explaining Jim Crow:

The University of Dayton

Ferris State University

“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 millions of African-Americans now cycling in and out of prisons and jails or under correctional control. In major American cities today, more than half of working-age African-American men are either under correctional control or branded felons and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.” — Michelle Alexander as interviewed by NPR

Appearing on NPR’s Fresh Air, Alexander spoke about how President Reagan’s war on drugs led to a mass incarceration of black males and the difficulties these felons face after serving their prison sentences. She also details her own experiences working as the director of the Racial Justice Program at the American Civil Liberties Union.

“He declared the drug war primarily for reasons of politics — racial politics. Numerous historians and political scientists have documented that the war on drugs was part of a grand Republican Party strategy known as the “Southern strategy” of using racially coded ‘get-tough’ appeals on issues of crime and welfare to appeal to poor and working-class whites, particularly in the South, who were resentful of, anxious about and threatened by many of the gains of African-Americans in the civil rights movement.“– Michelle Alexander on Fresh Air

Alexander says that people are swept into the criminal justice system at very early ages and typically for fairly minor, nonviolent crimes. Young black males are shuttled into prisons and branded as criminals and felons.

Upon release from prison, they are relegated to a permanent second-glass status, stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement such as:

“Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you’ve been branded a felon, ” Alexander says.