After 10 years, 'The New Jim Crow' still has much to say about race, drug convictions and injustice
Indeed, the federal system houses 221,000 inmates, compared with 1.3 million in state prisons and 612,000 in local jails, according to the Prison Policy Initiative in 2019.
Although the proportion of state prisoners whose primary crime was a drug offense rose sharply from 1980 to 1990, when it peaked at 22%, Pfaff writes, that leaves about four-fifths who were found guilty of some other offense. By 2010, it fell to 17%. Bottom line, says the statistics expert: Reducing the incarceration of drug offenders will not do much to reduce prison populations.
Other scholars have made similar claims. Jonathan Rothwell, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, tries nobly to reconcile the differences by comparing the time and length of sentences for different crimes. Drug crimes have been the predominant reason for new admissions into state and federal prisons in recent decades, but those offenders tend to serve shorter sentences than those convicted of violent crimes.
"Rolling back the war on drugs would not totally solve the problem of mass incarceration," he writes, "but it could help a great deal, by reducing exposure to prison."
That makes sense. So do a number of black community residents who would like to see tougher law enforcement. The get-tough approach is much less popular now. That helps to explain why former Vice President Joe Biden seemed to be caught in a time warp as he tried to defend his support of the get-tough 1994 crime law that Alexander blames for making the mass incarceration problem worse.
As some of us remember, that bill was supported by a lot of black folks, including the Congressional Black Caucus, although with some reservations as they called for other reforms, too.
But today, years after the totally unexpected crime drop in the mid-1990s, more people of all races are asking questions about the role race plays in our justice system. After all, crack cocaine, primarily a plague in black communities, was treated as a crime problem. Opioid abuse, more closely identified with poor white communities, has been treated as a public health problem.
Racial disparities like that are not easily brushed off as coincidence. Nor should they be. Instead, they help to explain the popularity of Alexander's book.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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