American Criminal Justice System And Mass Incarceration

The history of Jim Crow is a story of white power, but it is also a story of black survival and resilience. The Jim Crow era lasted nearly a century because of the federal government and there is still work to be done today. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander, is a book about the discrimination of African Americans in today 's society. One of Alexander 's main points is the War on Drugs and how young African American males are targeted and arrested due to racial profiling. Racial profiling, discrimination, and segregation is not as popular as it used to be during the Civil War, however, Michelle Alexander digs deeper, revealing the truth about our government and the racial scandal in the prison systems. The term mass incarceration refers to not only to the criminal justice system but also to the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control the labeled criminals both in and out of prison today. The future of the black community itself may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.

Jim Crow laws are regarded as part of the racial caste system that operated in the Southern and Border States in the years between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Under the series of the anti-black laws, African Americans were treated as inferior and second class citizens. The laws have been argued to have represented the legitimization of the anti-black racism in the US. The book The New Jim Crow Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is written by Michelle Alexander and originally published by The New Press in 2010. The present paper reviews the above book with the intention of identifying the author’s main argument and the essence of the writer’s message to the readers.

There are a lot of important issues that Americans face today. But one of the most important is mass incarceration. This problem is affecting the economy, the government spends billions of dollars to keep people in prison. Private own prison are getting a lot of money just to house prisoners. Prison is one of the biggest businesses in America. These prisons are profiting from minorities and by holding undocumented immigrants. A lot of people that are incarcerated didn’t commit serious crimes. Some people are in prison on nonviolent drug charges. Does America Needs a Alternatives to Incarceration, maybe the government should try to rehabilitate nonviolent offenders.By population china is the most populous country on earth. And yet America a country with four times less the population has more prisoners. This is happening in a country that advocates freedom and democracy. A country sometimes called the free world .Is this happening because America has the most violent criminals in the world? What are the causes for the unusually high incarceration rate in America? Because of government continuously implying new strict laws America has become the country with the highest incarcerated.

The persuasive novel, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander is designed to change your whole perspective of the American Justice System. Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar. She’s won a variety of awards in the field of civil rights and has worked with supreme court judges. Alexander wrote the book with the intention to show that contrary to popular belief, the most despised group in America is criminals. The main focus was the war on drugs and how it affects African-Americans. Former inmates are a group to which discrimination isn’t only accepted but approved in society. In Michelle Alexander’s, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age

Our past is full of cases that represent the inequality of the criminal justice system. In the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of Plessy V Ferguson, in 1896 the court upheld racial segregation and made the separate but equal the standard doctrine of the United States until 1954, when the Supreme Court handed down the decision in Brown v Board of Education which made the racial segregation illegal and highlighted the protections offered in the fourteenth amendment as it relates to equal protection. Despite the 14th Amendment 's promise of life and liberty under the law, this group of Americans found themselves subject to another law, known as the "Jim Crow Laws." These were a group of laws passed primarily in the southern states during reconstruction and lasting until around 1965, were established to make sure that the whites were treated differently than the blacks, in everyday life, including the criminal justice system. Even though the Jim Crow era has passed by, we unfortunately have come to the conclusion that we have just entered a new era of Jim Crow. “We are arguably no longer under Jim Crow or de jure discrimination; however, unfortunately and regrettably, we are presently realizing manifest de facto discrimination, or the new Jim Crow” (Durrant, 2015). Statistics show that over 40 percent of students who are expelled from school today are African American and over 70 percent of students who are referred to law enforcement for criminal activity are

For more than a decade, researchers across multiple disciplines have been issuing reports on the widespread societal and economic damage caused by America’s now-40-year experiment in locking up vast numbers of its citizens. (The Editorial Board)

To understand the effect mass incarceration, you must understand the history behind it. From slavery to the war on drugs declared by the Reagan administration, African American men have been placed at the bottom of a caste system only to lose every fighting chance they get to move up. I like how the author does not discredit success stories like Oprah or Barack Obama (a considerable influence on her writing) but instead acknowledges how they are a few who make it out of this flawed system and persevere (Alexander, 2012). I do feel as though people who are against the idea that mass incarceration exists or that there is a racial inequality issue in the criminal justice system use the success of affluent African Americans to deny that there is

Throughout history the justice system has been used to maintain institutionalized racism, and has only continued if not intensified under the private prison system (Burris-Kitchen, Burris, 2011). As much as people want to believe that we are past racism in this country and that minorities are equal, there has never been a time in our nation where this was the case, even today (Burris-Kitchen, Burris, 2011). Though it is hard for those of us who have never experienced it to understand there are still a great many who still hold prejudice views but furthermore, there are still laws in place that unfairly target African Americans (Burris-Kitchen, Burris, 2011). The private prison industry through lobbying to maintain discriminatory laws has helped

After reading the book, you should have a fuller understanding of the inner workings of the (CJS) criminal justice system. Further, you will understand not just the effects of Jim Crow, but more important, how so many young African-American males end up on the road to the new Jim Crow. Ninety-five percent of the information in this book comes from first hand knowledge, and not what somebody told me, or someone else’s work. You will also be able to communicate the facts of the criminal justice system more effectively with others. In this book, the focus is on the insights gained by the author from his ten years in the courtroom as a trial lawyer, and his more than 200 jury

This paper discusses the social justice issue of discrimination in the American criminal justice system. It reveals the history behind the integrated racism in the system and its effect on people of color. The key organization, Black Lives Matters, addresses the issue and is critically analyzed. A new solution that improves upon the social justice issue by targeting youth is presented.

The United States of America prides itself on the premise of equality. Written into the Bill of Rights of the United States is the phrase, "all men are created equal." However, this statement alone ignores women and the definition of "man" only included those free men who were determined to be "white." From the time of slavery, being white in the United States has come with freedoms that have not been extended to other racial groups. A social construct, race has been used to justify the systematic discrimination and mistreatment of those deemed to be "other." While modern American 's claim that there is a colorblind society, where the people of the United States have overcome their racist roots this is simply not the case. Since the end of slavery and reconstruction, there has been a new era of racial discrimination and oppression that is enacted through the criminal justice system. To explore the issues of racism in America this paper will present a brief history of the discrimination in the United Stated. After this introduction, the topic of incarceration in America and race will be fully discussed. As one will see from this discussion, the failed War on Drugs has resulted in not only the mass incarceration of African Americans but also the systematic discrimination of these individuals.

The United States criminal justice system is a complex and expansive part of the modern government, with jails and prisons growing rapidly. In comparison with European countries, the US is an outlier in our rates of incarceration. Throughout history, America has unjustly, yet strategically grown the prison industry through the mass incarceration of people of color. This is evident with policy changes through the years, notably the policing of socioeconomically disadvantaged which often are communities of color. The incarceration of communities of color demonstrates the existing and lasting inequalities the US still reproduces. Imprisonment unfairly binds people into cycles of injustice through unfair treatment, and lack of opportunity. Cycles of injustice often become recreated through generations and communities.

According to studies done by The Sentencing Project, America has experienced a 500% increase in prison populations over the last 40 years. Of the 2.3 million people incarcerated, 67% are People of Color (Mass Incarceration). This is a startling number, increasingly so when you consider that People of Color make up merely 23.1% of the population (US Census). These statistics paint a grim and confusing picture. How can a racial minority in our country have such an overwhelming presence in our prison system? In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander explains the narrative of events leading up to where we are today. And from there, we can illustrate how there is a racial bias in our criminal justice system.

Modern society has implanted the belief among its citizens that color nor race play a factor in the decisions that are made each and every day. However, as history has shown this is solely untrue, a social/racial hierarchy has been constructed to define a clear division between the white and minority races, especially African-Americans. White men have held their role as “superior” at the top of the hierarchy, followed by lower class whites, and blacks have been confined at the bottom. Society has instilled the idea that racism and inequality has been “overcome” and eliminated. Thus, it does not seek to confine blacks in certain position in this self-created social hierarchy nor does it seek to sit the white race on a pedestal as superior to any other race. However, as one looks at America’s several stages of racism and segregation as the enslavement of African Americans, the creation of the Jim Crow Laws, and now as the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander argues the process of mass incarceration, they have all incarnated the same purposes; to limit the rights of African-Americans, control the minds of passing generations, and continue that fine division between the superior and inferior races. The only difference among the stages is that they have been altered to fit the views of what is acceptable during each time period. In the introduction, Alexander eloquently states her purpose of writing this book as she

In the novel the new Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander expresses how mass incarceration is a form of racial control. She argues that Jim Crow laws were not diminished but simply revised to suppress the minorities in America. It is vital to understand the prejudice and unjust works of the courts and political system.