The convict leasing system contain about 90% of black people as if barely no white men or women were breaking laws. The percentage of blacks was so high, because of the “Pig Laws”. Those laws had been used to target and accuse many blacks for supposedly owning money, stealing a pig, or not being able to keep a job that they were often restricted from. I don’t understand how those broken laws could had even be remotely compared to true felons that are murderers. If somebody was in the system of convicts it was even worse than the known slavery. The system was brutal that whipped, killed, hardly fed, mentally, and physically abused these people. They were even easier to replace, because of so many black people being thrown into the system. Making
Primarily highlighted in the documentary is the idea of mass incarceration as “The New Jim Crow”, a phrase popularly used by author and civil rights advocate, Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. As many already know with it being a significant part of American history, the Jim Crow era was a time of intense racial segregation of African Americans from whites with the former having drastically inferior positions in society. Many of the discriminatory practices that were upheld in the Jim Crow era, including discrimination in housing, jobs, and voting are illegal now if applied to blacks, but are perfectly legal when applied to prisoners, many of whom are
The Prison Industrial Complex flourished during the Reagan Administration. It was a way for Corporate America to use cheap prison labor to make huge profits for their corporations. With 42% of the prison population being black and only 13% of the country being African American, it’s easy to realize that the government was exploiting the black prisoners with cheap labor, no union representation, and huge profits that did not get passed on to the prisoners. According to author Michelle Alexander, there are more blacks in prison today than there were enslaved in 1850. This is what she refers to as “The New Jim Crow.” In her argument, she states: “In this era of colorblindness, it was not socially permissible to use race as a tool for disfranchisement, marginalization and discrimination” (Module 9/ Page 6).
Agree: Slavery was a commodity that separated African Americans and other individuals. When slavery was diminished the prison systems, then became another form of slavery, a system used to keep the races separate. One thing the government did not know though is that the prisons would eventually get to such a mass population. It also does not help that the government knew what they were doing. The 13th amendment states that citizens could gain freedom, but if they were to become a criminal then the following words would not apply to them. So, in behalf people figured they could get people they did not like and
The documentary “13th” is very telling about the problems with the prison system and society's view of African-Americans. After the end of slavery, the economy too a hit because of the lack of labor needed for the industries. To solve this problem, people turned to prison workers, because it was cheap labor that weren’t protected under the 13th Amendment. This amendment abolished slavery and indentured servitude, but left the clause of criminal punishment. Because of this loophole, and because whites were very much still in control of society soon after the 13th Amendment was passed, police forces began going after African-Americans in order to fill prisons and satisfy work forces.
To dig deeper into this overrepresentation of black criminality, we have to look at the loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment, which allowed slavery as a form of punishment in the prison system. The policymakers recognized the opportunities to acquire forced labor through mass incarceration and made use of the perpetuating cycle of racial formation, where representations and the actions of the institution often reinforce each other. The structural institution, or the policymakers in this case, used overrepresentation of black criminality to racialize crime. The overrepresentation of racialized crime then validates the need of criminal laws and their unequal application across racial groups. In the end, the institution created the false representation that justifies its actions which further feed the representation. The vicious cycle introduced racial discrimination into the justice system and guided the process of mass incarceration.
How is it that prison reformers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries put such a big amount of effort into changing the way people were being punished. Without touching on the importance of racial disparities occurring during that specific time-period. Davis states “If the individual was not perceived as possessing inalienable rights and liberties, then the alienation of those rights and liberties by removal from society to a space tyrannically governed by the state would not have made sense.” (Davis 2003: 44). African Americans can be viewed as one of the greatest racially discriminated groups of people since the beginning of slavery. Many viewed slaves as unintelligent individuals that were nothing more than a piece of meat whose main purpose was to endure hard labor for no pay. This “airtight system of social control” (Burris & Burris 2011) is the foundation of oppression that has allowed our society to devalue the rights
The cost of living is always on the rise, so naturally the cost of maintaining our public prison systems and its inmates is also on the rise. Not only does the cost to maintain the prisoners alive and healthy rise; our draconian laws that seem to make youth and the African American community the target, keep sending more and more offenders into the prison system. Without acknowledging alternative solutions and rehabilitation programs that are readily available. We currently live in an age where old laws from eras long past still rule. This is to say that we still follow laws that were put in place decades ago that are racist and unjust. Many of these laws emerged from the turbulence of the 1960’s; when the increasingly rebellious college youth and African American civil rights movements looked to change the nation. Laws were put in place directed at mainly these two groups: laws such as having a 100 times larger
Looking at the social order at the time is important to understanding what is to come. While the slaves were now free and able to do as they pleased, there was still a deeply embedded racism within the minds of Southern whites. Just because blacks had fought in the Civil War did not suddenly mean that the perception of blacks had changed; rather to the Southern elites, they still viewed blacks as inferior and only good for labor, longing to perpetuate the slave system but within a new industrial framework seeing as how the agricultural framework had been destroyed. This new system was to be found in through convict leasing.
To think that slavery days are over and people from minority communities in America don’t face racial discrimination at the hands of public authorities would be self-delusional. Slavery still exists in the US but in a different form and with new mechanisms. Private prison system is one such mechanism through which racialized America is still maintained holding people of African-American and Hispanic origin in confinement for years irrespective of the fact whether there are actual crimes reported or not. High incarceration rate, nexus between the corporate companies and government agencies, racial prejudice against people of black underclass, dehumanization of prisoners in private prisons laced with racial bias and corporatization of prisons
Of the many tribulations that plague Americans today, the increase in the amount of African American men and women in prisons is unbelievable. It would be naïve to say that the increase is due to the fact that more African Americans are committing crimes now than before. When in actuality it has very prevalent connections to a systematic plan to incarcerate a race of people by creating harsh drug laws to
Though most citizens in the United States would agree that the prison system in the U.S. needs to be amended, do they see the prison system as a way to enforce the racial caste system? At first Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow, did not see the prison systems as racially motivated until doing further research. After researching the issue, Alexander found the prison system was a way to oppress African Americans and wrote the novel The New Jim Crow. The New Jim Crow follows the history of the racial caste system and in the novel Alexander comes to the conclusion that the mass incarceration of African American is the New Jim Crow, or in other words a new system of black oppression. Though some might try to refute the idea of mass incarceration of African Americans, Alexander offers a well thought out argument with substantial evidence and data to compellingly link Jim Crow and mass incarceration and proves that it is an issue that should be on the radar of all U.S. citizens.
American has a legacy of the mistreatment and disenfranchisement of African Americans. The same bad treatment that many think only took place in the past is in fact still intact, it’s just presented in a new way. The mass incarceration of blacks in the Unites States can be attributed to the “racial hierarchy” that has always existed. The U.S contributes to about 5% of the worlds overall population, and about 25% of the worlds prison population (Holland 1), “if those rates reflected jail, probation and parole populations, the numbers would rise exponentially”(Griffith 9). Statics show that there is a chance that about 1 in 3 black males are expected end up in prison (Jacobson). Although, in terms of the entire United States population African Americans only make up about 13% (Prison Activist Resource Center. Racism Fact Sheets: “ Latinos and the Criminal Injustice System.” 2003). There is a huge number of African Americans involved in the criminal justice system in some way. The average person does not know about mass incarceration nor about the racism that is in just about every part of the criminal justice system. When most people think about racism their thoughts often drift to slavery or Jim Crow laws, but for most, they do not consider how the amount of African Americans in prison today could be due to bias or racism. A significant cause of mass incarceration is the same racism that produced the Jim Crow era.
Between 1700 and 1900 a system familiar to our eyes emerged as a result of important changes. The 1800s very harsh and a lot of crime was done in that time. The laws, punishment and jail were similar, also very different from today's. In the 1800s the punishment was much more survivor and stick to it more than now. If you lived back in that time, it was usual to walk the streets and you see a hanging happening. This showing the cruelty and none caring of the people and how harsh the punishment was.
After 245 years of slavery, the United States consistently tries to redefine itself as an inclusive country in attempt to erase their past. In reality, those who are in power have found new ways to enforce their power on non whites, specifically African-Americans in America, one of which is through the prison system. Eller mentions that although the percentage in the American population of black men are 12 percent, they constitute for 44 percent of arrests for violent crimes (Eller, pg. 280). In addition, African-Americans are given longer prison sentences for the same crime committed by
The documentary 13th by Ava DuVernay was a visual masterpiece. The documentary provided its viewers with an array of information that spanned throughout centuries and was eloquently executed in less than 2 hours. The central focus of the film was about how the 13th amendment shaped this country and its prison system. The 13th amendment was the building block for mass incarceration and as time has gone on, new laws and amendments strengthened the process for more people to get incarcerated. Slavery benefited the country as a whole and as the Civil War was winding down, slavery was coming to an end. As the documentary states, the South especially relied heavily on slavery for their economy to sustain. After the passing of the 13th amendment, slaves were freed and it left the South’s economy in shambles. A stipulation within the 13th amendment, that states “Neither slavery not involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been dully convicted, shall exist within the United States.” In turn, mass amounts of newly freed slaves were arrested and deemed criminals. Being criminalized reduced them back to a lower status in the United States, and unfortunately reignited slavery in a new kind of form. The film was not only educational, it also provided its viewers with knowledge about why there is such a disparity in mass incarnations amongst people of color compared to their white counterparts.