Genre
Nonfiction; Political Science; Criminal Justice
Setting and Context
Present-Day United States
Narrator and Point of View
Third-person point of view
Tone and Mood
Straightforward, indignant, didactic, and outraged, yet also cautiously optimistic
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: African Americans unfairly treated by the criminal justice system; Antagonist: People who are indifferent to the suffering of the incarcerated and the injustice of the system
Major Conflict
The major conflict lies in whether the American people and politicians will frankly consider what the system of mass incarceration is doing to communities of color and move to correct the abuses of the New Jim Crow.
Climax
N/A
Foreshadowing
Alexander lays out how Jim Crow laws foreshadowed those of the New Jim Crow, and how slavery foreshadowed Jim Crow. She alludes to other possible futures of racial stratification and progress.
Understatement
- "The New Jim Crow was born" (58).
- "Mass incarceration has been normalized" (181).
Allusions
Alexander alludes to many black intellectuals and Civil Rights figures and their ideas: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois. She also mentions Law and Order (59), a TV show many people think shows the reality of the criminal justice system but absolutely does not.
Imagery
See "Imagery"
Paradox
"We know that people released from prison face a lifetime of discrimination, scorn, and exclusion, and yet we claim not to know that an undercaste exists. We know and we don't know at the same time" (182).
Parallelism
N/A
Metonymy and Synecdoche
N/A
Personification
- "[The criminal justice system] was not just another institution infected with racial bias but rather a different beast entirely" (4).
- "[Justice Douglas's] voice was a lonely one" (63).
- "Descriptions of the silence that hovers over mass incarceration are rare" (169).
