AUTHOR: RACIAL CASTE SYSTEM REDESIGNED AS CRIMINAL-JUSTICE SYSTEM

Jim Crow laws that promoted segregation and stripped blacks of voting
rights during the past two centuries were wiped off the books by
1960s civil-rights legislation, but they have reappeared in another
guise, a race expert argued in several Denver forums this week.

Michelle Alexander, a civil-rights lawyer turned scholar, said
America's racial caste system didn't disappear - it's just been
redesigned as the criminal-justice system.

It continues to control and oppress young men of color, said
Alexander, author of the 2010 book "The New Jim Crow: Mass
Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness."

The "war on drugs," three-strikes laws and other mandatory-sentencing
measures instituted since the 1980s disproportionately punish poor
minorities, she said.

In the past 30 years, the U.S. prison population has exploded from
about 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions
accounting for most of the increase. While denying any conspiracy,
federal sentencing councils have nonetheless recognized that laws
requiring harsher punishment for crack-cocaine possession than the
powder version disproportionately affected black males, and some have
been rolled back.

The racial dimension, Alexander said, is the most striking feature of
mass incarceration.

What she calls selective prosecution has led to an astounding
percentage of the African-American community being warehoused in
prisons, she said.

Many are imprisoned for minor drug offenses committed just as
frequently by white Americans, but the laws are enforced more often
against minorities, she said.

The U.S. Department of Justice reports that boys born in 2001 face
the following odds of going to prison: 1 in 17 for whites; 1 in 6 for
Latinos; and 1 in 3 for African-Americans.

In Colorado, as of 2007, African-Americans made up 3.8 percent of the
state's general population but 19.4 percent of the prison population,
according to a Colorado Department of Corrections report.

Latinos were 17.1 percent of Colorado's population, yet they made up
31 percent of those in prison. Whites accounted for 74.5 percent of
Coloradans but were 46 percent of the prison population.

America's criminal-justice system, Alexander said, is not just
infected with racial bias; it is an "eerily familiar" comprehensive
system of racialized social control.

Alexander took her controversial message to the Iliff School of
Theology and Park Hill United Methodist Church on Wednesday and to
students at Manual High School on Thursday.

One of the reasons that much of the hard civil-rights work of the
past 30 years has failed to achieve racial equality, Alexander said,
is because it has been done by lawyers and other professionals. It
has been about litigation, not cultural change.

"I firmly believe that nothing short of a major social movement has
any hope of ending mass incarceration," Alexander said during the
Iliff forum. "Ultimately, the movement has to be a spiritual one. I
hope people within the faith community will step up and say, 'Let our
people go.' "

Iliff associate professor Carrie Doeh ring, whose area of expertise
is pastoral care, said Alexander made her
completely rethink traditional prison ministry.