David Remnick: I spoke with Michelle Alexander at the start of 2020 before the pandemic, the presidential election, and the killing of George Floyd. Alexander is currently a professor at Union Theological Seminary. When The New Jim Crow came out a decade ago, you said that you wrote it for the person I was 10 years ago. Take me back to those times, to that Michelle Alexander and the work you were doing for the ACLU. What were you finding out?

Michelle Alexander: That would have been 20 years ago from today. Back during those years, I was working as a civil rights lawyer. I was well aware that there was bias in our criminal justice system and that bias pervaded all of our political, social, and economic systems, that's why I was a civil rights lawyer. What I didn't understand was that a new system of racial and social control had been born again in America. A system, eerily reminiscent to those that we had left behind.

In fact, I was heading to work my first day at the ACLU, directing the racial justice project, when I happened to notice a sign posted to a telephone pole that said in large bold print, "THE DRUG WAR IS THE NEW JIM CROW." I remember thinking to myself, "Yes, the criminal justice system is racist in a lot of ways, but it doesn't help to make comparisons to Jim Crow." People just think you're crazy, and then I hopped on the bus and headed to my new job. It was really as a result of representing victims of racial profiling and police brutality that I had a series of experiences that began what I've come to call my awakening.

Remnick: What was that awakening like? What were you seeing in a very specific way in your work where the scales were falling from your eyes in a way?

Michelle: There were a number of incidents. Partly, it was beginning to collect data and coming to see how the police were behaving in radically different ways in poor communities of color than they were in middle class, white or suburban communities. This wasn't a shock to me in any way but the scale of it was astonishing. Seeing rows of Black men lined up against walls, being frisked and handcuffed and arrested for extremely minor crimes like loitering or vagrancy or possession of tiny amounts of marijuana.

There was one incident in particular and it involved a young African American man who walked into my office one day and forever change the way I viewed myself as a civil rights lawyer and the system I was up against. He walked into my office carrying a stack of papers a couple of inches thick. He had taken detailed notes of his encounters with the police. At the time, I was interviewing people for a possible class-action suit against the Oakland Police Department.

I thought, "Wow, maybe we have finally found our dream plaintiff. Maybe this is the one we've been looking for." Then he says something that makes me pause. I said, "Did you just say you're a drug felon?" We knew we couldn't put someone on the stand if they had a felony record because we'd be exposing them to cross-examination about their prior criminal history and turning it into a mini-trial about a young man's criminal past rather than the police conduct.

I'm looking at him saying, "Okay, you're a drug felon?" He gets very quiet and says, "Yes, yes, I'm a drug felon but let me tell you what happened." Then he starts telling me this long story about how he'd been framed and drugs have been planted on him and he becomes more and more agitated and upset. Then finally, he becomes enraged and he says, "What's to become of me? What's to become of me?" He starts explaining that he had just taken the plea because he was afraid of doing the time and that they told him that if he just took the plea, he could just walk out, just walk right out with just felony probation. He said, "What's to become of me? I can't get a job anywhere because of my felony record."

He's like, "Do you understand? I have to sleep in my grandma's basement at night because I can't even get into public housing with a drug felony. How am I supposed to take care of myself? How am I supposed to take care of myself as a man? I can't even feed myself." He was like, "Do you know I can't even get food stamps because of my drug felony. Good luck finding one young Black man in my neighborhood they haven't gotten to yet. They've gotten to us all already."

Remnick: How conscious was that? How would you argue that there was a conscious decision to establish a successor, in a sense, to Jim Crow and what came before Jim Crow?

Michelle: There were mixed motives. One of the things that I laid out in the book was the history of the Southern strategy, the deliberate political strategy of divide and conquer, of using get-tough racial appeals in order to appeal to poor and working-class whites, particularly in the south, who were fearful of and resentful of the progress that had been made by African Americans since the civil rights movement.

That Southern strategy was in part, about turning the clock back on racial progress. The drug war was in part, a politically motivated strategy, a backlash to the civil rights movement, but it was also a reflection of conscious and unconscious biases fueled by media portrayals of drug users. Those racial stereotypes were resonant with the same stereotypes of slaves and folks during the Jim Crow era.

Remnick: Michelle, some of the scholars that have been in dialogue with you about your book have taken issue with your focus on the war on drugs and nonviolent drug offenses. John Pfaff in his book, Locked In says that only about 16% of state prisoners are serving time on drug charges and very few of them, maybe about five or 6% of that group, are both low-level and non-violent.

Michelle: It is true that roughly half of the people who are held in state prisons today have been convicted of offenses that are labeled violent. One of the main points of The New Jim Crow, what I hoped to get across, was that the system of mass incarceration is not simply about who is behind bars at any particular moment, it is this much larger system. A system that begins when a young person is swept off the street for a minor, non-violent drug offense like possession of marijuana, branded a criminal or felon, and then released into a permanent second class status. There are twice as many people on probation or parole today then are locked in prisons or jails, twice as many and that is The New Jim Crow.

Remnick: There's been a lot of energy around criminal justice reform and attempts to change the system but one of the big roadblocks has been the fact that a huge number of prisons, 70% in fact, are located in rural communities and go a long way toward bolstering the economies of those places.

Michelle: Yes. The profit motive is significant and very often people think about the profit motive simply in terms of private prisons making money off of caging human beings. However, as the book Prison Profiteers points out, there is a very large range of corporate interest, private interest that make enormous amount of money off of our prison system. Everything from private healthcare providers to taser gun manufacturers, to companies that are now creating these electronic monitors.

Remnick: E-carceration, you call it.

Michelle: Yes. This is one of the most concerning developments to me, the emergence of the system of e-carceration or digital prisons, as many activists now call them, where people are now being forced to wear electronic monitors, GPS tracking devices. It will be cheaper to surveil and control millions of people electronically than through old-fashioned brick-and-mortar prisons.

Remnick: What do you say to people who argue that these technological solutions are somehow more humane than prisons and jails?

Michelle: Certainly most people, myself included, would rather have an electronic monitor, a GPS tracking device attached to my ankle than to be sitting in a literal cage. However, I find it very difficult to call a system of e-carceration and the emergence of digital prisons as progress. Progress would be decriminalizing our communities, massive investments in education, in drug treatment, in healthcare, in trauma support. That's what our communities need and deserve not new high-tech means of monitoring, surveillance, and control for larger and larger segments of our population.

Remnick: Finally, I hope you don't mind if I ask, but seems to be a personal, professional question. Your main teaching post has been at an institution that has religion and faith at its center, the Union Theological Seminary. Does that choice represent a change in your thinking on criminal justice or in your own life?

Michelle: As I see it, the crisis of mass incarceration is not simply a legal or political problem to be solved, but it's a profound spiritual and moral crisis as well. I think ultimately these questions of, what does it mean to be in right relationship to one another? Who belongs in a community, in a nation? How should we treat the least advantaged? How do we repair harm in a constructive and responsible way?

Remnick: Are these questions at the center of the next book?

Michelle: Yes, they are. I'm working on a book that is very different from The New Jim Crow. It's much more personal. It's about my journey going from a liberal civil rights lawyer who was tinkering with the machine to someone who now believes that much more revolutionary change is required, but it's not simply a political revolution, a moral and spiritual revolution is also required of us now.

Remnick: Michelle Alexander, thank you so much.

Michelle: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

[music]

Remnick: That was Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow originally published in 2010. Our conversation first aired last year.

[00:12:52] [END OF AUDIO]

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