Jim Crow laws were passed after the Civil War to maintain segregation between black people and whites even after emancipation. These laws often drew on Black Codes, which were themselves often just Slave Codes with the word "slave" replaced with "Negro." The effect of Jim Crow laws was that black people, especially men, were unduly criminalized for actions that simply weren't illegal for white people. One glaring example is the ways that vagrancy laws made it a criminal offense to be unemployed, something that was only enforced against black men. Another example is the extortion of free labor from incarcerated black men.

The New Jim Crow shows the ways that the prison industrial complex has not changed its patterns since its inception, despite the outward appearance of reform. Prisoners are still disproportionately black or members of other racial minority groups. Labor is still extracted from inmates, although now it is for a pittance of wages rather than for free. And, perhaps most significantly, the mass incarceration of huge swaths of communities reduces their economic potential and feeds into systems of generational poverty. This impoverishment is used alongside other social structures to maintain segregation, even though now, to be legal, it has to occur along lines that appear to be economic instead of based on race. Still, the effects are hauntingly similar.