"In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color 'criminals' and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you are afforded scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” p. 2
In the introduction to the book, Prof. Alexander establishes her essential point—that the incarceration and post-incarceration legalized discrimination experienced today by the vast number of people with felony records, many of whom are Black, is akin to the discrimination against African Americans during the Jim Crow era. This discrimination includes being excluded from voting, jury service, jobs, publicly-supported housing, food stamps and other support for the poor, and student loans. Mass incarceration and the ensuing discrimination is a new way to impose a racial caste system.
Alexander highlights the War on Drugs, declared by President Reagan in 1982, and points to it as the cause of mass incarceration. Due to racism in both enforcement and sentencing, African Americans make up a disproportionate number of those convicted of and imprisoned for drug crimes. Although Alexander seems to say that mass incarceration and the resulting stigmatization are rooted in racism and are a purposeful recreation of a racialized caste system, she also insists that this new caste system does not require racial hostility or overt bigotry, but only racial indifference.
“Criminals, it turns out, are the one social group in America we have permission to hate” (p. 141).