New data on the New Jim Crow
First-of-its kind dataset shows Southern states ramped up incarceration of Black people in response to the federal crackdown on Jim Crow voting laws
There’s a solid case to be made that the U.S. didn’t become a true democracy until 1965. That’s the year Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which outlawed things like literacy tests and grandfather clauses which were intended to prevent Black people from exercising their right to vote.
The passage of the VRA, along with the ongoing dismantling of Jim Crow laws that had been happening in the South in the early 1960s, allowed Southern Black voter participation to surge. During the 1952 presidential elections, for instance, only about 1 in 10 Black Southerners were able to vote, according to data compiled by political scientist Bernard Fraga. By the 1968 election around half of Southern Blacks participated.
To Whites in the South, Black voters’ new political clout represented a threat. The old racial hierarchy was in danger of being upended. According to civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander, Southern Whites responded to this threat by remaking the criminal justice system into a tool of racial domination, locking up hundreds of thousands of Black Americans under ostensibly race-neutral new guidelines.
Alexander calls the staggering racial disparities of the modern prison system the “New Jim Crow,” and she published her argument in a 2010 book by the same name. Now new data, published in a leading political science journal last month, adds some additional empirical heft to Alexander’s argument. Assembling a first-of-its-kind database on racial incarceration rates in state and county prisons going back to the 1940s, the authors find convincing evidence that Southern Whites responded to the Voting Rights Act by systematically targeting Black people with criminal charges and incarceration.
Their main results are summarized in the chart below.
One of the main provisions of the Voting Rights Act was Section 5, which required states with a history of racist disenfranchisement to submit any changes to their voting systems to the federal Department of Justice for review. The Section 5 states were, essentially, the Really Racist Ones. They included Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia.
The study authors, Nicholas Eubank and Adriane Fresh, compared the rate of Black prison admission in these states to admissions in similar states that were not covered by Section 5. The specific question they were interested in: following the passage of the VRA, did Black incarceration change meaningfully in Section 5 states relative to non-Section 5 states? The answer, as seen in the chart above, is an emphatic yes.
Prior to the VRA, Black imprisonment rates were actually higher in the non-Section 5 states. But after 1965, the authors write, “there was a differential increase in Black prison admissions in states covered by Section 5 relative to those that were not covered. By 1985, Black admission rates in covered states had surpassed those in never-covered states.”
A skeptic might look at these trends and say “well, maybe the Section 5 states simply cracked down on crime across the board following passage of the VRA.” But that’s not the case: Eubank and Fresh find that in the Section 5 states, Black people began getting locked up at a much higher rate than Whites following 1965. But that’s not true for the non-Section 5 states.
“If there are factors—such as generalized crime, or a generally increasing preference for punitiveness—affecting both sets of prison admissions rates regardless of race, then we would not expect to see these differential trends,” they write. Instead, the results indicate that Southern states subject to Section 5 of the VRA responded by targeting Black people for incarceration as a way to maintain the racial status quo.
The Southern States remain affected by these trends to this very day. Mass incarceration is a self-reinforcing phenomenon: children of imprisoned parents are more likely to become imprisoned themselves, in a never-ending cycle of poverty, despair and violence. Starting in the 1960s, Southern Whites essentially made a conscious decision to inflict this cycle on their Black neighbors.
Academics have been studying these forms of structural racism for decades — indeed, there’s a whole field devoted to it. It’s no coincidence that today, at a time when White conservative racial resentment has again reached a fever pitch, that White lawmakers in the South and elsewhere are working to erase this racial legacy from the history books.
Is "per 100k" really the correct label on your graphic?