Attorney and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander likened America's criminal justice system to the Jim Crow laws that regulated blacks in the South to second-class citizens.
Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow," was the keynote speaker during Grand Valley's Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Week. She spoke January 18 to an audience in the Kirkhof Center. Alexander will give another presentation Thursday, January 19, at 10 a.m. in the Cook-DeWitt Center.
“The system of mass incarceration today functions like the systems we supposedly left behind years ago,” she said. Alexander told the audience that the number of prisoners in the U.S. (2 million) is the highest in the world.
She projected that the nation’s war on drugs, formalized during the Ronald Reagan administration, led to the dramatic rise in the prison population. Over a 30-year period, she said, the number of prisoners quintupled.
“Both Republicans and Democrats started to get tough on drugs,” she said. Alexander said under President Clinton, convicted drug offenders were barred from receiving federal financial aid for education. Prisoners in most states cannot vote and convicted felons are typically excluded from jury duty, she said.
“They also face employment discrimination, housing discrimination,” she said. “The system is designed to send folks back to prison.”
Alexander said only a national social movement, similar to the civil rights movement of the King era, will remedy mass incarceration. She recognized that overhauling the criminal justice system would mean people would lose jobs.
“We are so rooted in our political and social structures that this will not fade away without a radical shift,” she said. “We need to go back and pick up where people like Dr. King left off.”
She also called for a justice system that focuses on rehabilitation and education, not punishment.
