After the collapse of Jim Crow, especially seeing the great success experienced by some African Americans, we start to feel the system of racial caste is officially dead and buried. However, that is just an illusion. Behind the rhetoric of institutionalized equity, our criminal justice system is working as the new Jim Crow preventing blacks from participating in our electoral democracy. While Constitutional amendments guaranteed African Americans "equal protection of the laws" and the right to vote, through a web of laws, regulations, and informal rules, all of which are powerfully reinforced by social stigma, they are confined to the margins of mainstream society and denied access to the mainstream economy. During the Reconstruction Era, whites felt threatened and outraged as African Americans were exposed to more social and economic opportunities and started to obtain political power. To turn the table and regain all the black labors they had for free for centuries, southern states drastically increased the penalties for minor offenses. Southern conservatives founded Ku Klux Klan, which fought a terrorist campaign against Reconstruction governments and local leaders, complete with bombings, lynchings, and mob violence. I can never forget those horrible pictures in which some white onlookers were smiling or laughing with the blacks burning or hung on the tree in the background. How sick they had to be to enjoy watching another human being tortured and murdered?
Reconstruction failed bitterly, which was predictable, followed by the Civil Rights Movement aka the “Second Reconstruction”. Due to the increased political power of blacks with their migration to the North and the influence of the World War II, the Supreme Court voided constitutional segregation and negated racial discriminations in real estate market. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 formally dismantled the Jim Crow system of discrimination in public accommodations, employment, voting, education, and federally financed activities. The best thing is that black children could finally shop in department stores, eat at restaurants, drink from water fountains, and go to amusement parks that were once off-limits. Then the Civil Rights Movement began to evolve into a "Poor People's Movement," which promised to address not only black poverty, but white poverty as well—thus raising the specter of a poor and working-class movement that cut across racial lines. Unfortunately, as the crime rates went up due to complex reasons, the Civil Rights Movement was identified as a threat to law and order. Instead of an explicitly racist agenda, segregationists developed the racially sanitized rhetoric of "cracking down on crime"—rhetoric that is now used freely by politicians of every stripe. After Ronald Reagan was elected with his “colorblind” rhetoric on crime welfare, taxes and states’ rights, he announced his administration's War on Drugs, when illegal drug use was on the decline at the time. It was shocking that the CIA admitted in 1998 that guerrilla armies it actively supported in Nicaragua were smuggling illegal drugs into the United States—drugs that were making their way onto the streets of inner-city black neighborhoods in the form of crack cocaine. As the result, the U.S penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million in less than thirty years. Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates; however, in some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men. And in major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.” The massive incarceration rate of African Americans due to conscious and unconscious bias in criminal justice system deprived their chance to start over with a clean slate. Once they are labeled, they will continue to cycle in and out of prison. Unless ex-offenders are given chances to reintegrate into mainstream society and economy, the system will never get rid of the growing undercaste.