No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

No Country for Old Men is a novel of borders. From the standpoint of genre, Cormac McCarthy plants himself at the border of Western and noir and pastoral. The novel also borders explicit violence while being, at times, understatedly reserved—same goes for its sentence structures: the dialogue is terse, brief; the narration provides clause after clause sewn together. All these stylistic choices run parallel to the novel’s setting: the border between Texas and Mexico, where a drug deal has gone horribly wrong.

Our protagonist, Llewellyn Moss, is out in the desert and stumbles across a heroin deal gone bad, one littered with dead bodies and a briefcase left behind full of cold hard cash. Llewellyn claims the case and takes it home to his skeptical wife, whom he keeps in the dark about his situation. To be fair, he’s completely truthful about the bag being full of money, but his dynamic with his wife assures that she will not believe him.

Unfortunately for Llewellyn, he has entered into a network of forces that far exceed his capacities. There are cartel members at war with each other, bounty hunters, and police that are trying to decipher what the heck is happening with all these dead bodies. One of my gripes with the text is that so many of the characters feel interchangeable. The terseness of the characters’ speech, for example, emphasized their wit but not their personalities. Each could be each—that is, except for the novel’s villain.

Bought to life in the film adaptation by Javier Bardem, Anton Chigurh is a truly iconic villain. In the text, his piercing blue eyes reflect a cold universe as he slaughters his way through Texas and beyond. Chigurh tracks down his pray and uses a cattle gun to murder people for as little as needing their car. His calculated and measured approach is sinister, but the text runs the risk of glorifying his ultraviolence by making him the character from whom we get the most insight into the novel’s core themes.

There are a few critical moments with Chigurh that serve the novel’s core themes. There is a moment when Chigurh initiates a gas station attendant into a coin toss game. He flips the coin and asks for the man to call it. The man protests because the stakes have not been made clear to him—he has nothing to gain. McCarthy is masterful in crafting the suspense of the scene, because we know that the man is betting on his life—and I think at some level he understands, too. Chigurh explains the genesis of the coin and the twenty years it took to get to that moment. Essentially, the scene is a reflection on fate. The past latches on and makes the moment inevitable—nearly. The only “choice” is left to chance for the man: a fateful 50/50. One of the reasons Chigurh is so compelling is because he, unlike the other characters in the book, seems to have a clear vision of how the world operates (more on this later). By giving him the chance to articulate his philosophy, he is given special priority in the reader’s mind, despite his horrific violence.

The other stand-out Chigurh murder-spree scene is when he kills Llewellyn’s wife. For a bit of a background, Llewellyn is provided the opportunity to return the money. Chigurh promises to kill him, but to let his wife live. Llewellyn is killed, somewhat randomly, at the hands of the cartel, undermining Chigurh as the agent of fatalism. Nonetheless, Chigurh arrives at Carla Jean’s house and tells her about his promise to kill her. Carla Jean protests, noting that Chigurh himself made the promise and that he could give up his mission. His rigidity assures her: no, the choice was already made.

The title of No Country for Old Men points towards the difference in philosophies at play. Chigurh reflects a precise, specific code for living. The world has rules, standards, and consequences, even if they’re partly determined by chance. What’s strange is that the sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, seems to have an affinity for Chigurh’s philosophy, even if he won’t acknowledge it. There’s a passage where Ed Tom explains how everything is changing and the younger generation no longer subscribes to conventions and so on. It’s as though he longs for the certainty and predictability of Chigurh’s philosophy.

This odd tension helps to explain, perhaps, Ed Tom’s obsession with—and inaction toward—Chigurh. Ed Tom cannot understand the logic of the villain’s chaos. He continually floats towards him but whenever he gets close, he shies away. In a moment of pursuit, Ed Tom seems to pull back, fearing his own death.

No Country for Old Men is unlike most books I read, especially in the realm of literary fiction. There are lengthy action sequences and pages of senseless slaughter. I initially found it a little challenging to get immersed—-there’s a lot of description of the desert and a play-by-play of the action. As the plot advances, I found myself more invested, if still a little confused about the interchangeable cast of characters. I wish there was a little more personality or experimentation with ‘voice’ for the characters, but the random anarchy of McCarthy’s world keeps the story running; there’s a moment when Chigurh is in a car accident and it could be what brings him down—except, he’s too clever. Following Chigurh murdering Carla Jean, I felt the story essentially had done what it needed to, but then Ed Tom provides a lengthy reflection that has the narrative peter out. 

Generally…I liked it! Happy reading!

American Woman by Susan Choi

     

        This year, Susan Choi was nominated for the Booker Prize for her new book, Flashlight, but we’re headed back in time twenty years to her second novel, American Woman. Even in this early work, later motifs in Choi’s work have become apparent. For example, American Woman’s main character bombs a building in protest, which gets echoed five years later as a central conceit in A Person of Interest. There’s a fair amount of reflection over whose story gets told and whose gets omitted, which is critical to Trust Exercise, released in 2019. My understanding is that Choi’s most recent work also makes reference to intergenerational narration with leaps back and forth across time—but I’ll need to get to Flashlight sometime later.

All things considered, American Woman was fine-to-good. It held the trademarks of Choi’s psychological probing and the moments of philosophizing between the pages of an otherwise character-driven piece. The book has a blessing and a curse when it comes to editing: there are passages that seem superfluous and it feels like the book could have been at least fifty pages shorter; at the same time, the book turns away from what feel like monumental events, like character deaths and failed heists. Part of what the novel is grappling with, though, is the way that we have selective focus. The book tells us the story is not about what we’ve been reading about, but something else entirely.

But we’ve gotten too conceptual too quickly. Here’s what the book is “about.” Jenny is a Japanese-American woman who bombed a government building in protest of America’s involvement in Vietnam. Prior to the book’s opening, Jenny relocates and works as a caretaker and restorer of a historic home in upstate New York. Frazer, a civil rights activist with a deep network of subversives, begins the book by tracking her down. They have history together and they have history together, but now he needs a favour. He has in his care a group of violent subversives who killed a number of police officers and who are the only ones of their cadre left alive after the slaughter. He needs to hide them and wants Jenny to tend to them while they write a book that will help make him a fortune. Their claim to fame is that they kidnapped the richest daughter in America and radicalized her to be one of them. She, Pauline, is under the care and tutelage of Juan and Yvonne as they hide from the authorities and drag Jenny into their mess.

The book meanders some while the characters are impelled (but continue not) to write their book, becoming an increasing drain on Jenny. That said, there are some moments that hit hard and some ambiguity over the political questions in the text. Choi refuses to provide audiences with the comfort of unambiguous answers. For example, what feels uncontroversial to me (resistance to the Vietnam war, advocating for civil rights) is complicated by Juan, the de facto leader of the cadre. Despite the stated aims towards equality, Juan is a domineering leader who comes across as misogynistic in many of his interactions with Jenny, Yvonne, and Pauline. Worse, maybe, is that during a late night conversation with Jenny he professes how she’s so much closer to reality and the revolution because of her race and, essentially, that it is a privilege to be the victim of racism. It’s sort of like the uncomfortable conversations in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. The whole conversation had my stomach twisting with discomfort: this figure of leftist revolution is steeped with racist (‘reverse racist’?) ideologies and seems totally oblivious to the Japanese internment camps (to which Jenny’s father was subjected.) Even Frazer’s attempt to do right by the criminals is compromised by his profiteering over their story. As with all things, it feels like the profit motive subsumes all intentions, noble or not.

Later, there’s a compelling twist where Pauline, the oblivious rich girl playing revolutionary, turns out to have masterminded a plot against Jenny, her seeming ally. The cadre plans a heist against one of Jenny’s contacts, and she is the critical piece standing in the way. Pauline is treated critically by Juan and Yvonne and she manipulates the situation to get closer to Jenny, winning her over to their side. It’s a compelling twist when Jenny realizes what has happened.

As I mentioned, there were a number of moments where the action is omitted, casting the audience into the fog of war. For instance, when the group finally gets the go ahead for the heist, it goes poorly. We don’t see the scene as a play-by-play, but only as a retrospective. Hence, we don’t get to see how someone ends up shot, and for some time it’s unclear whether Yvonne and Juan even survived. From there, we instead see Jenny and Pauline’s ride to their new lives and a new book essentially begins, one which recounts the fugitives’ search for a more regular, quiet life. In that section, psychological meditations persist. There’s question of whether the two are in love, or just what kind of relationship this is, exactly.

Running parallel to the main narrative is the story of Jenny’s father. I appreciate what Choi is doing here, drawing parallels with the injustice of Japanese internment camps and the injustice of the Vietnam war. Most of the memories from Jenny’s past, though, didn’t feel particularly resonant to me. In the last third of the book, there’s an account of the escape from the internment camp and Jenny’s father’s role (or lack of role) within it. The implications echo through the decades.

For all the book covers, I felt that the end of the book felt rushed. The last fifty pages or so account for the capture of various fugitives and how they respond to their apprehension—but the focus is not really the focus. Part of the book is about how the media reshapes stories, how the truth gets lost in retelling. So, the story isn’t so much about how the characters respond to being arrested and tried, but about how the public interprets the situation. Similarly, the book’s focus is not about events, but rather how characters respond to them—and more importantly, how readers respond. At the part of the book that would be the climax, we shift towards the past with Jenny’s father’s story. This formal choice seems to imply that the true heart of the story is not even what we see in the present, but deeply rooted in the past.

These formal flares help to carry the novel’s overall themes. Choi’s knack for psychological exploration and the surprise turns of the novel make it engaging, although I admit that the text felt a little bloated and repetitive. I think there’s a masterful hand at work here, but one still seeking its stride. The themes are well-worth discussing, but it requires some more digging and effort than I suspect average readers would be willing to engage in.

Happy reading!

How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment by Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché

I’m growing concerned with the impossible promise books with “how to” in their title seem to offer. As a reader, there’s a big part of me that is primed to expect a numbered list of steps tailored specifically to me and my context. I know I’m being unreasonable.

In any case, How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment by Justin Piché and Rachel Herzing is a book that embodies care and compassion towards incarcerated people. It is a commitment to a politics that focuses on finding more humane alternatives to imprisonment.

Like so many lessons from my youth, I learned a lot about the justice system from The Simpsons. In one episode, Sideshow Bob asks, in his own defence, whether the justice system is based on the idea that a man can change, upon which the chief of police comments, “Have our boys look into that.” In another episode, Marge becomes a police officer and Lisa says, “Mom, I know your intentions are good but aren’t the police a protective force that maintains the status quo for the wealthy elites? Don’t you think we ought to attack the roots of social problems instead of jamming people into overcrowded prisons?” After a pause, Marge presents a police dog puppet with a slogan that dismisses the nuanced conversation.

One of the highlights to me of Herzing and Piché’s is the way that they extend that conversation. Despite the title of the book being about abolishing prisons, abolition is not for them an all-or-nothing shift and they take to task the people who object to improving prisons since it is not abolition. I really appreciated that perspective. Demanding outright abolition is a noble goal, but while we wait, so many incarcerated people are suffering from inhumane conditions that could be ameliorated. Herzing and Piché focus on the immediate, real-world experiences of prisoners in favour of the idealism that sometimes inhibits change.

In order to keep that focus on material change, abolitionist organizations emphasize direct communication with imprisoned people. It was compelling to hear about the impact of letter writing campaigns and how much they’ve meant to incarcerated folk. Additionally, abolition can look like small-scale actions like driving incarcerated people to and from hearings and getting to know them directly. These small actions promote an understanding of others and give us a direct insight into the conditions of prisons. I really appreciate the way that abolition can take the form of direct connection. It reminds me of the chapter of Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” about getting to know your neighbours as a way of resisting tyranny.

If How to Abolish Prisons doesn’t persuade you to rethink our system on humanitarian grounds, the authors make a compelling case against prisons for a number of reasons: they’re resource-heavy on the climate, they’re exploitative for profit, and they’re not effective in addressing the root causes of issues. The book celebrates a number of successes with communities resisting new prison construction and engaging in other large-scale action against prisons. While it maybe didn’t go as in-depth as I had hoped, the book’s optimism really helped to offset that feeling.

Happy reading and happy reforming!

Erewhon by Samuel Butler

I’ll confess that I read this book for a silly reason. Apparently there’s a grocery store called Erewhon and in the latest season of White Lotus, one of the characters is carrying an Erewhon bag and someone online suggested that perhaps the bag serves a double purpose: to show the expensive tastes of the character but also to connect thematically to Samuel Butler’s (sort of) classic. So, I picked it up to see for myself. I’ll admit, there are some conceptual connections, but ultimately I don’t think the flash-second-frame of product placement is meant to be a key to the text that is White Lotus.

Erewhon is a novel first published, I believe, in 1927 and it follows the traditions of Robinson stories, that is, a person is stranded in a place unlike their home and needs to acclimate to a new way of life. These stories tend to be couched in social commentary with a touch of adventure, and in Butler’s case it definitely waxes philosophical. The main character is working abroad and is led to discover new territory because of some superstitions that forbid journeys out from the community spark his interest. After a disorienting journey, he ends up in Erewhon. The plot is pretty bare-bones, although he somehow learns a language and falls in love before running away again, and most of the chapters are philosophical discussions of how the Erewhonians live. I suppose it’s satirical but its intention is not necessarily always clear.

Some of the philosophical underpinnings of Erewhon that stand out are as follows:

• Technology is illegal; the main character is prosecuted for wearing a watch 

• Illness is illegal; your bad luck at the hands of the creator is a testament to not being deserving of good treatment

• Children must sign legal documents that they are responsible for their own miseries and whatnot because…

• The afterlife is, essentially, a perfect idyllic life and when you are dead you’re also unborn; in order to be born you have to leave the perfect paradise by killing yourself and committing to whatever misery life brings on

In the latter part of the book, there are lengthy chapters about the war over technology. Essentially, one philosopher (described as a prophet) describes the idea of machines rapidly evolving beyond their creators, so much so that they are no different from living beings and will eventually surpass all human capabilities. There’s a kind of reverence towards machines and then that reference is further extended into discussing animals. An opposing philosopher tries to argue that vegetables also deserve the same respect as animals and not to be interfered with. There’s a clear Darwinian influence there that challenges the distinctions between our hierarchies.

Returning to some of the main principles of Erewhon, the idea of misfortune being criminal is explained as follows: “You may say that it is your misfortune to be criminal; I answer that it is your crime to be unfortunate” (110). The main character is perhaps guilty of such crime but there’s a paradox at the core of it: “the more you had been found guiltless of the crime imputed to you, the more you would have been found guilty of one hardly less heinous—I mean the crime of having been maligned unjustly” (110).

The discussion around machines is probably the most compelling, developed, and contemporaneously relevant part of the book. The philosopher discusses the rapid acceleration of machines. Again, this is 1927, but it’s so obviously applicable in the context of Artificial Intelligence. The philosopher discusses his fear of the “extraordinary rapidity” with which machines are developing. With a clear echo of evolutionary discourse, the philosopher writes “no class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward.” It then progresses in terms of a slippery slope argument where we might have to consider destroying current machines, despite being harmless, because of the dangers they might bring on later.

The initial stage of machines is that they “receive their impressions through the agency of man’s senses: one traveling machine calls to another in a shrill accent of alarm and the other instantly retires; but it is through the ears of the driver that the voice of the one has acted upon the other. Had there been no driver, the callee would have been deaf to the caller” (229). At this stage, machines rely on human operators, but Butler notes the concern that “there was a time when it must have seemed highly improbable that machines should learn to make their wants known by sound [...] [but] may we not conceive, then, that a day will come when those ears will no longer be needed, and the hearing will be done by the delicacy of the machine’s own construction?---when its language shall have been developed from the cry of animals to a speech as intricate as our own?” (229). Alan Turing eat your heart out.

The slippery slope argument continues to the result that machines surpass and essentially enslave mankind. Machines are superior to man in every way:

“The machine is brisk and active, when the man is weary; it is clear-headed and collected, when the man is stupid and dull; it needs no slumber, when the man is stupid and dull; it needs no slumber, when man must sleep or drop; ever at its post, ever ready for work, its alacrity never flags, its patience never gives in; its might is stronger than combined hundreds, and swifter than the flight of birds; it can burrow beneath the earth, and walk upon the largest rivers and sink not.” (232)

Meanwhile, man is described as “such a hive and swarm of parasites that it is doubtful whether his body is not more theirs than his, and whether he is anything but another kind of ant-heap after all” (232). That’s a pretty incredible observation in its own right: even back in 1927 we’re breaching the walls of the post-human. The question of how individual or “special” humankind is within nature and, heck, within technology is a thought-provoking exploration. By extension, though, and since machines are superior to mankind, Butler asks, “May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?” (232).

If there’s something the book does particularly well, it’s challenging the primacy of mankind. Butler continues on to note that “It is said by some that our blood is composed of infinite living agents which go up and down the highways and byways of our bodies as people in the streets of a city. When we look down from a high place upon crowded thoroughfares, is it possible not to think of corpuscles of blood traveling through veins and nourishing the heart of the town? No mention shall be made of sewers, nor of the hidden nerves which serve to communicate sensations from one part of the town’s body to another; nor of the yawning jaws of the railway stations, whereby the circulation is carried directly into the heart (232). The passage goes on, but I think it’s evocative enough on its own and my commentary would add very little to your own experience.

Butler echoes the survival of the fittest discourse and how lower animals progress because of struggle: “the weaker die, the stronger breed and transmit their strength” (235). The application of this in machines is pretty compelling: “The machines being of themselves unable to struggle, have got man to do their struggling for them: as long as he fulfills this function duly, all goes well with him—at last he thinks so but the moment he fails to do his best for the advancement of machinery by encouraging the good and destroying the bad, he is left behind in the race of competition; and this means that he will be made uncomfortable in a variety of ways, and perhaps die” (235). It’s a little surreal to think about how we shift from creating and maintaining machines for our own benefit and then becoming reliant on them “So that even now the machines will only serve on condition of being served, and that too upon their own terms; the moment their terms are not complied with, they jib, and either smash both themselves and all whom they can rach, or turn churlish and refuse to work at all.” We can see pretty easily how we are forced to play into the logics of technology: Google expects certain things from you to to make the searches work, for example. We also rely on charging our devices and guiding our lives around digital storage and streaming: “How many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day? Is it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom?” (235).

In any case, the book offers a glimpse into a moment in history that was asking the same kinds of questions we have today. The plot is pretty lacking—I was hoping for an experience more like his The Way Of All Flesh, which I read a million years ago and remember unexpectedly loving—but there’s enough here to grapple with, even if it reads a little bit dry by modern standards.

Happy reading!

Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga

  I often think about the role of statistics in inciting people to feel sympathy and take action. The anonymity of numbers, unfortunately, disguises the profoundly horror of some aspects of human existence. It often feels like hundreds or thousands of people die and are absorbed into their status as a statistic. If we know someone, though, how can we quantify the loss of them? Such sorrow is impossible to fathom.

I also think about a line from the poem “Dreamwood” by Adrienne Rich that reads, in part, “she would recognize that poetry / isn’t revolution but a way of knowing / why it must come.” I wonder about that, too. Do words actually incite change? It feels increasingly unlikely as we see unquantifiable amounts of ink spilled to fight against politicians that daily make the world a worse place and seem undeterred by the looming ridicule on their epitaphs.

Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers is the same kind of knowing: a humanizing knowing. For years, this book was required reading for teenagers and teachers studying Indigenous issues—with good reason. It’s informative with respect to issues that came up in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, including the horrors of residential schools, the dismantling of families through biased adoption practices, the failures of law enforcement and legal proceedings, and so forth. The book is specifically focused, though, on telling the stories of real people. Talaga offers a thorough account of the tragic deaths of Indigenous students in Thunder Bay. The victims, though, are actually humanized in a way rare to nonfiction. Beyond just telling us their names, means of death, culprits responsible, and so forth, we get a sense of their interests, their friendships, their passions.

In turn, Seven Fallen Feathers is the kind of book that inspires us to see things differently, to see abstract issues as tangible. It’s the kind of book that inspires a revolution in thinking and proves instructive in empathy. There are moments of such profound devastation that the idea of blindly accepting injustices becomes beyond ludicrous. The deaths of the children feel personal, and Talaga’s account of the suicide attempts of an adult who cared for these students and lost everything else wring the heart at every level.

Talaga’s gifts as a writer carry the stories to a new level of resonance. She is journalistic in nature, but offers a narrative spin. Seven Fallen Feathers reads almost novelistically. The pacing of the events feels carefully crafted around story beats and the characterization of real people is wrought in fine detail. The language of the book is given such care and it reads beautifully. It has the engaging tone of a true crime podcast, but deals with systemic issues and maintains a deep focus on the people most deeply affected.

The book is compelling in every regard. It shows compassion for the community, offers a critical eye to systems that reinforce injustice, and provides the young people who lost their lives with the dignity and respect that they deserve. From a narrative standpoint, the book works. From a nonfiction informative standpoint, the book works. As a political act, the book works.

Now let’s do the work. Happy reading.

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander is essential reading. It’s the only mandatory minimum sentence I’ll provide here.

If you’re looking to understand the history of incarceration in the United States, this book gives a thorough account of how we got here. Alexander gives an excellent overview of how slavery took shape in the United States, how policing emerged from that context, how poor Whites were turned against poor Blacks and leveraged a modicum of advantage that created the context for ongoing racism, how Jim Crow laws morphed slavery into a new form, and how the carceral prison system is a direct extension of the racist policies and climate that exist in the United States. It’s profoundly informative.

I think we can (almost) all agree that the prison system is highly problematic and needs reform / abolition. The New Jim Crow challenges many assumptions society holds about the prison system in the United States, even reforms that we (White people) believe to be progressive. Alexander offers counter-readings that expose the impact of prison reform practices on Black lives. For instance, even in the preface, Alexander discusses the idea of house arrest. Many people hail it is as being a more humane approach to punishment—surely superior to a prison cell. Yet, when we rely on technology to police, even the slightest problem can have severe consequences for Black prisoners. The “well-intentioned advocates” of technological solutions that advocate for monitors and algorithmic judgements neglect that the algorithms are already biased and that constant surveillance does not mean freedom. Consider also that ankle monitors have a series of problems: 1) the zone in which you’re able to travel may preclude you from having a job, seeing your family, raising your children, and so on. 2) The private GPS tracking company that provides the ankle monitor may charge you up to three hundred dollars a month for the “service” and 3) they are prone to malfunction, which may alert police to come to you immediately and bring you back to jail or deport you for breaking your conditions. We also know how much encounters between Black citizens and the police can escalate, which creates a new risk every time the GPS signal cuts out. Considering these challenges really illuminated for me the extent to which our alternatives to prison are often ill-advised or ill-considered from a specifically White lens.

We also cannot talk about modern prisons without discussing the War on Drugs. The anti-drug legislation that exists has a racial bias that targeted users of crack cocaine (as opposed to powder cocaine), which had different historical and racial contexts where Black citizens were more likely to use crack, while powder cocaine was for White people. [As an aside, she notes how it’s only when White people start using particular drugs that the conversation changes towards decriminalization or legalization—or even towards discussing the drug as a public health concern, rather than a concern with crime]. Alexander notes how only one senator commented on how the focus on crack was a scapegoat for other kinds of societal ills, arguing, “if we blame crime on crack, our politicians are off the hook. Forgotten are the failed schools, the maligned welfare programs, the desolate neighbourhoods, the wasted years. Only crack is to blame. One is tempted to think that if crack did not exist, someone somewhere would have received a federal grant to develop it.” It’s a poignant criticism and points to the trend we see consistently in discussing social ills. People talk about the fentanyl epidemic now and the increase in drug use—but how often do we talk about the root causes of those issues?

I’d like to focus a bit more on the notion of policy, since it becomes increasingly clear that there is a disconnect between policy and the context of peoples’ lived realities. That understanding is thoroughly explored in Alexander’s book and one case in particular struck me as significant. In 1988, the year I was born, there was a new Anti-Drug Abuse Act that was passed and created more punitive consequences for drug crime. For instance, it
“authorized public housing authorities to evict any tenant who allows any form of drug-related criminal activity on or near public housing premises.” When we think about where drug crime comes from, we can imagine the economic context of aspiring dealers and frequent users. To think that people who are already struggling could be evicted is a harsh sentence, but think also of some of the language used here: what does it mean for a tenant to “allow” any form of “drug-related” criminal activity “on or near” public housing premises? The vagueness of the language permits evictions that may not be justified. Consider, for instance, a tenant whose fifteen year old son, unbeknownst to her, agrees to lend car keys to a drug dealer so that he can drive ten blocks to sell. Did she allow this to happen? Is loaning car keys drug-related? Is ten blocks near the premises? These ambiguities permit selective evictions—and who will bear the brunt of them, I wonder?

Worse, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act “eliminated many federal benefits, including student loans, for anyone convicted of a drug offense.” Drug crimes are the result of desperation. Taking away opportunities further perpetuates the problems and renders it more likely that Black men will end up in prison. The act expanded the use of the death penalty for drug crimes and increased the mandatory minimum for drug offences, even for people with no previous criminal convictions (5 years for possession of cocaine with no evidence of intent to sell). Previously, the mandatory minimum for possessing any type of drug was one year.

The “tough on crime” discourse that emerged at the time failed to target the societal conditions that created crime and instead punished people unnecessarily. It’s kind of like how if we took all the money that went into policing homelessness, we could literally just give people homes. Alexander offers a number of anecdotes about “tough on crime” mentalities that are as horrific as they are depressing. For instance, if you’re okay with the death penalty, consider whether it was just for Ricky Ray Rector, a Black man convicted of murder who was put to death but was so “mentally impaired” that he “had so little conception of what was about to happen to him that he asked for the dessert from his last meal to be saved for him until the morning.” I find that absolutely devastating and Alexander follows it up with a quote from Bill Clinton gloating that he could not be considered “soft on crime.” Why is that something we aspire to? Alexander’s juxtaposition of the two moments is laced with tragedy and a grim poetics.

Any time you hear people discussing crime, it would behove you to act like a three year old and keep asking why and not stop.

“I’m tough on crime.”

“Why?”

“Because these criminals are putting people in danger.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re selling drugs to little kids.”

“Why?”

“Because they can make a profit and don’t care.”

“Why?”

“Because…”

I’d keep that conversation going, but I don’t know how act tough on crime enough. Essentially, what it will come down to is that policies, laws, and their enforcement preclude people from living full lives. Surely it’s clear that crime is a response to inadequate housing, inadequate social services, inadequate mental health services, inadequate employment opportunities, and so forth. There’s a history for crime, and Alexander persuasive argues that that history is bound up with racism.

Some objectors will suggest that crime is “race-neutral”, but The New Jim Crow exposes these race-neutral necessities as false. For instance, people might argue that Black people are more prone to use and sell drugs when, in fact, that is not true, but rather reflects a cycle of racist policies and perceptions. Alexander notes that people have “differential access to private space” and that “influences the likelihood that criminal behaviour will be detected.” She gives the example of how wealthy people selling drugs are likely doing so in a private location, like inside a home, while poor people tend to have to share space and will go outside in order to conduct their exchanges. So, police catch crime in concentrated areas of the poor where drug enforcement is more easily achieved. Then, the statistics show more crime in that area so they continue going there, meaning they catch more people, and the cycle repeats.

Similarly, potential jurists cannot be excluded based on race, but supposedly race-neutral language can be used to exclude Black jurors. For instance, fashion choices stereotypical to Black males might be excluded as untrustworthy or undesirable. Someone may not like the look of someone’s hair. They don’t say Black, but that’s the underlying message. So even when cases go to trial, there is such little chance that one’s peers will truly be there to assess the case.

One thing we often forget is that incarcerated people do not exist in a vacuum. They have families, children. They have friends and communities that suffer when they are isolated from one another. When people are forcibly removed from their families, everyone suffers. Try that “why?” question out the next time some racist says that Black dads are never there for their kids. Why aren’t they there? Where are they? Why are they in prison? Why did they allegedly commit the crime? The New Jim Crow also blew my mind in its discussion of parole. One very common condition of parole is that you cannot associate with anybody that has a felony conviction. This means that when you go back to your high-poverty neighbourhood, if there are other people who have been convicted, you cannot even go out for groceries without getting a parole violation. One drug offence can mean that you are prohibited from all kinds of interaction—and that happenstance may have you violating the rules of parole and being sent back to jail. White people do not have the same challenges when finding a community after parole. Mass incarceration reproduces segregation. Alexander notes that people who might have escaped or transformed their communities instead find themselves “in a closed circuit of perpetual marginality, circulating between ghetto and prison.”

Politically, it’s worth noting that convicted people cannot vote. The convicted cannot voice their convictions, as it were. This note that felons are unable to vote disproportionately affects Black citizens, and indeed was initially designed to ensure an all-White electorate. Supposedly race-neutral barriers to voting have sprung up in all kinds of forms: a poll tax, a literacy test, a requirement not to have ever been convicted—all measures that are contextually targeted towards Black folk. This mass incarceration also seems to contribute to the trend of re-electing people who are “tough on crime”—-if the people who are mass-incarcerated could vote, we might actually see some reform or abolition of the prison system in lieu of more proactive social policies.

Alexander breaks down at every level how the prison system is designed with an anti-Black bias. From the focus of the legislation, to the enactment of it and the policing which follows, to the selection of jury members, to the extent of punishments, to our public discourse around crime: all of these are contributing factors to a profoundly racist system. In part of the book, she even discusses how “criminal” is a re-coding of “Black.” As people recognized that they could not be overtly racist, they had to change the language to a dog whistle other White people would understand.

The book is incisive, persuasive, informative, and all good things nonfiction should be. It opened my eyes to angles I previously hadn’t considered and provides the historical context essential for weighing in on any issues related to crime and punishment.

Read it. Spread the word. Make change.