Having outlined the history and architecture of mass incarceration in the United States, Alexander now discusses the specific similarities between the Jim Crow era and the United States since the start of the War on Drugs in 1982. In revisiting the severity of the new racial undercaste, she points out that the number of Black men and women under some form of correctional control today is greater than the total number who were enslaved in 1850. An African American child born into slavery was more likely to be raised by his mother and father than one born today. Finally, fewer Black men have the right to vote than in 1870 at the height of Reconstruction. When Black leaders and cultural figures ask where all the Black men have gone, Alexander says the answer is simple: They are lost in a criminal justice system designed to turn them into second-class citizens. Perhaps the reason few notice, she suggests, is that while the system took great effort to build, it takes very little to maintain.

Alexander addresses what she considers a legitimate challenge to her thesis: that a criminal justice system biased against people of color is nothing new. Indeed, America’s earliest prisons were disproportionately filled with Black men, a crisis made even worse after the Fugitive Slave Act made every African American in the North, freed or not, the target of police hunting down enslaved people who had run away.