Rodricks: Jim Crow alive and well in U.S. prisons - baltimoresun.com

Rodricks: Jim Crow alive and well in U.S. prisons - baltimoresun.com
Here's something you won't hear much about in the coming Maryland gubernatorial election: The United States has the world's highest incarceration rate and a de facto racial caste system that discriminates against hundreds of thousands of black men in the way Jim Crow laws once did. You won't hear anything close to that from Martin O'Malley, the Democrat and present governor, nor from Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., the Republican and wannabe-governor-again who, compared to Mr. O'Malley, is a downright progressive on corrections.

You likely won't hear about it from any of the Marylanders running for the U.S. House or Senate this year. And the first black man elected president will probably refrain from such rhetoric, too.

In fact, few politicians want to talk about criminal justice unless pressed to do so. They certainly do not speak about the consequences of the system's design: massive numbers of men, and an inordinate number of black men, in prison, on parole or on probation for drug-related offenses, unable to find employment because of their criminal records, and generally unable to get on track, support their families and reintegrate as contributing citizens.

You don't hear many civil rights leaders talk about this anymore, either.

That's one of the sad conclusions Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and law professor in Ohio, reaches in her important book, "The New Jim Crow," published by the New Press.

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