To write about crime and punishment in Baltimore and America is to write about race. To address the question of how race is embedded in our criminal justice system is to begin a hard conversation that does not come easily even to those committed to racial equality, civil rights, and reform of the criminal justice system. Even those who speak passionately and with insight into how race still defines Baltimore and America in the 21st century often find it easier to exclude the criminal, the imprisoned, the felon.

For example, my November feature on the consequences of the strategy of mass incarceration pursued in Maryland and America for the last generation attempted to show that strategy's profoundly disproportionate racial impact. I cite the widely read and praised work of Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. What is much less widely acknowledged and discussed is Alexander's damning critique of the civil rights and racial justice community for its failure to see the criminal, the imprisoned, and the felon as central to their project.

She writes:

Mass incarceration—not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement—is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. The popular narrative that emphasizes the death of slavery and Jim Crow and celebrates the nations "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama is dangerously misguided. The colorblind public consensus that prevails in America today—i.e., the widespread belief that race no longer matters—has blinded us to the realities of race in our society and facilitated the emergence of a new caste system.

Alexander goes on to explicitly criticize the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the ACLU (for whom she worked), among others, for their failure to take up the mission of changing our criminal justice system. However, beyond organizational failure, she casts her indictment more broadly: The liberal, the righteous advocacy organization, middle-class strivers of all hues, much of the faith community, and, almost without exception, the Democratic Party politician have enabled this "public consensus" that is blind to the consequences of the strategy of mass incarceration.

Alexander goes on:

The central question for racial justice advocates, is this: are we serious about ending this system of control, or not? If we are, there is a tremendous amount of work to be done. The notion that all of these reforms can be accomplished piecemeal—one at a time with disconnected advocacy strategies—seems deeply misguided. All of the needed reforms have less to do with failed policy than a deeply flawed public consensus, one indifferent, at best, to the experience of people of color.

And more important than the perpetuation of liberal "colorblindness," Alexander argues, is how our blindness inhibits our inability to effectively strategize about how to change the current system:

Those who believe that advocacy challenging mass incarceration can be successful without overturning the public consensus that gave rise to it are engaging in fanciful thinking, a form of denial. Isolated victories can be won—even a string of victories—but in the absence of a fundamental shift in public consciousness, the system as a whole will remain intact. To the extent that major changes are achieved without a complete shift, the system will rebound. The caste system will reemerge in a new form, just as convict leasing replaced slavery, or it will be reborn, just as mass incarceration replaced Jim Crow.

Some have criticized Alexander for extending the Jim Crow metaphor too far. Georgetown University Law professor James Foreman, Jr. (son of James Foreman, Sr. who was executive secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) for example, writing in the Boston Review notes:

Like others committed to the Jim Crow analogy, Alexander occasionally overlooks or downplays its analytical limitations. But being as clear as possible on the differences between Jim Crow and contemporary conditions is essential to building a criminal justice-reform movement. After all, racial-justice advocates might be persuaded by the Jim Crow analogy, but success requires persuading skeptics as well.

For Foreman, it's the question of "not if, but how" we should organize against the current system of mass incarceration and its consequences that is most important.

He goes on:

Those who call attention to the harm caused by our current criminal-justice policies must also be ruthlessly honest about the harm caused by crime. This, too, is a matter of racial justice: victims of crime—especially violent crime—are disproportionately poor, young, and black or brown. It is also a strategic imperative. Tough-on-crime advocates are not going to stop talking about violent offenders and the need to protect communities from them. If reformers shy away from the topic, their chances of building a broad movement for change will suffer.

Although defining mass imprisonment as a black thing may be effective in garnering support from fellow racial-justice advocates, it is likely to discourage whites (including white prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their families) from joining efforts to fight mass imprisonment. Thus the Jim Crow analogy threatens to undermine [the] goal [of] … forging a multiracial grassroots movement against mass imprisonment.

The point of reviewing the substance of this debate—and more broadly for undertaking this year-long series—is precisely because this debate is needed in Baltimore. Both advocates and skeptics need to be having this conversation right now if we want that "multiracial grassroots movement" against the strategy of mass imprisonment that so scars and deforms our city today.