Michelle Alexander 's View Of The Book

Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, examines mass incarceration in the United States, why the criminal justice system works the way it does towards minorities, the detriments associated with mass incarceration as it relates to offenders, and much more. In the introduction of her book, Alexander immediately paints the harsh reality of mass incarceration with the story of Jarvious Cotton who is denied the right to vote among other rights because he, “has been labeled as a felon and is currently on parole” (1). Other information Alexander presents in her introduction are her qualifications as an author of the book, and gives a brief summary of each chapter and how each one is laid out. Her qualifications are she is African-American civil rights attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and is also an Associate Professor at the University of Stanford Law School. From a critical standpoint, Alexander seems very qualified to write on the topic, being part of the marginalized group and also being an expert in the legal field of which the topic covers, enhances her ethos to where one could consider her an expert in mass incarceration topics, as they relate to African-Americans. Overall, the introduction of her book does a great job starting out giving a stark reality of topic at hand, giving brief statistical references about mass incarceration in the United States, and giving an outline for her book.

This targeting led to the incarceration, imprisonment, chain gangs, prison farms and other correctional facilities for tens of thousands of African American men, women, and children.” The idea of mass incarceration being used to systematically oppress black people has traveled to the surface with Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, and Taylor talks about the effect of mass incarceration. In the book, Alexander highlights that the majority of the African American men are either in prison or have some type of criminal record making it unable for them to vote and get jobs. Alexander describes the criminal justice systems as the “New Jim Crow,” a modern type of oppression for African Americans. Mass incarceration rate skyrocketed during the Drug War and many African American were jailed for several years for petty crimes, shown in the documentary 13th by Ava DuVernay. Alexander book shows the oppression of African American and is a statement to change our criminal justice system that is targeted to victimize African Americans. Ultimately, Taylor points out that not only do the police have the power to destroy your body, but by using their power to charge African American men for petty crimes they able to effectively keep African Americans in a lower-class status, supporting the white suprematist view manifested in our police force.

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 New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness was written by Michelle Alexander to expose the truth of racial injustice in the system of mass incarceration through the comparison of the racial control during the Jim Crow Era. She reveals how race plays an important role in the American Justice System. Alexander argues about the racial bias, particularly towards African-Americans, immanent in the war on drugs as a result of their lack of political power and how the Supreme Court tolerates this injustice.

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.

Mass incarceration is known as a net of laws, policies, and rules that equates to the American criminal justice system. This series of principles of our legal system works as an entrance to a lifelong position of lower status, with no hope of advancement. Mass incarceration follows those who are released from prison through exclusion and legalized discrimination, hidden within America. The New Jim Crow is a modernized version of the original Jim Crow Laws. It is a modern racial caste system designed to keep American black men and minorities oppressed with laws and regulations by incarceration. The system of mass incarceration is the “new Jim Crow” due to the way the U.S. criminal justice system uses the “War on Drugs” as the main means of allowing discrimination and repression. America currently holds the highest rate of incarceration in the world, and even more African American men imprisoned, although white men are more likely to commit drug crimes but not get arrested. The primary targets of the criminal justice system are men of color. Mass incarceration is a rigid, complex system of racial control that resembles Jim Crow.

In the book The New Jim Crow: “Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” is written by Michelle Alexander talks about issues the racial caste and mass incarceration in the United States. Michelle Alexander argues that even Jim crow is over, but there’s still injustices in people of color communities. In her book “The New Jim Crow”, Alexander describes many social problems make African American people controlled by institutions. The author compares Jim Crow with mass incarceration is a form of controlling black Americans as Jim Crow law. Through Michelle Alexander's book, we can understand her argument that mass incarceration is a new form of legal discrimination just like Jim Crow law. The criminal justice system is biased toward the powers of privileges. Mass incarceration in America is “the new Jim Crow”, a new form of social control because the racial caste system segregates people away from mainstream society.

The third critical book review for this class takes a look at “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander published in 2012 by the New York Press. This book analyzes the problem with the incarceration system in the United States today that unfairly affects the African American community. This incarceration system is continuing to separate families, strip men of their freedom, and effectually make them into second class citizens upon release from prison as “free” men. She even describes that those who are convicted of these crimes are “relegated to a racially segregated and subordinated existence” (Pg. 4). Michelle Alexander is not only a published author but is also an active Civil Rights activist all while currently employed as an associate professor of law at Ohio State University. It is a very interesting read that coincides with where our class discussions have recently been. It argues that we as a country have not ended racial discrimination but just transformed it into a new type of caste system. It is an eye opening book that created an uncomfortable feeling while reading due to my level of ignorance on this topic prior to taking this class. I believe that this book will serve as an important narrative into fixing the race problems in this country because it brings to light what needs to be fixed. If any progress is made it will be because of books like this that expose the problems but starting to fix them will be the next step.

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.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a book by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. The book discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States. Michelle Alexander (2010) argues that despite the old Jim Crow is death, does not necessarily means the end of racial caste (p.21). In her book “The New Jim Crow”, Alexander describes a set of practices and social discourses that serve to maintain African American people controlled by institutions. In this book her analyses is centered in examining the mass incarceration phenomenon in recent years. Comparing Jim Crow with mass incarceration she points out that mass incarceration is

Mass incarceration became a public policy issue in the United States in the 2000s. Now in 2016, there are still many questions about America’s incarceration rate, 698 prisoners per 100,000 people, which is only surpassed by Seychelle’s at 868 for every 100,000. They concern the phenomenon’s beginning, purpose, development, and essentially resolution. In her book published this year, assistant professor of history and African and African-American studies at Harvard Elizabeth Hinton challenges popular belief that mass incarceration originated from Reagan’s War on Drugs. Mass incarceration’s function as a modern racial caste system is discussed in a 2010 book by Michelle Alexander, an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, civil

This “war on drugs,” which all subsequent presidents have embraced, has created a behemoth of courts, jails, and prisons that have done little to decrease the use of drugs while doing much to create confusion and hardship in families of color and urban communities.1,2Since 1972, the number of people incarcerated has increased 5-fold without a comparable decrease in crime or drug use.1,3 In fact, the decreased costs of opiates and stimulants and the increased potency of cannabis might lead one to an opposing conclusion.4 Given the politics of the war on drugs, skyrocketing incarceration rates are deemed a sign of success, not failure. I don’t totally agree with the book (I think linking crime and black struggle is even older than she does, for instance) but I think The New Jim Crow pursues the right line of questioning. “The prison boom is not the main cause of inequality between blacks and whites in America, but it did foreclose upward mobility

The book, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is about the mass incarceration of African Americans in the criminal justice system. It depicts individuals who were arrested on drug crimes. Because these individuals are labeled as criminals, it becomes difficult for them to find work, housing, and public assistance. (Alexander, 2010) The themes in this book include denial and ignorance, racism and violence, and drugs.

Racial discrimination in the United States has been a radical issue plaguing African Americans from as early as slavery to the more liberal society we see today. Slavery is one of the oldest forms of oppression against African Americans. Slaves were brought in from Africa at increasingly high numbers to do the so-called dirty work or manual labor of their white owners. Many years later, after the abolishment of slavery came the Jim Crow era. In the 1880s, acts known as the Jim Crow laws were enacted by Southern states to keep oppression of African Americans alive. These laws helped to legalize segregation between blacks and whites. Slavery and Jim Crow were created to regulate how African Americans functioned in society. Slaves were refused the right to vote, refused citizenship, refused education, and labeled as incompetent as a way for whites to keep what Author Michelle Alexander of the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness calls “social control”. Alexander argues that mass incarceration is the new modern “racial caste system” of social control. She further goes on to claim that this new system of mass incarceration has replaced the old social systems that were used to oppress African Americans such as slavery and Jim Crow. The system of mass incarceration fueled by the War on Drugs was established as a form of racial control. This new system puts people of color into an endless cycle of

In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Modern Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, the author argues the legal system doing its job “perfectly” well—the United States has simply replaced one caste system, the Jim Crow laws instituted in the 1880s and designed to oppress recently freed black slaves, for another—a system which uses the War on Drugs, which was instituted in the 1970s, to imprison, parole, and detain people of color, keeping the majority of minorities in the United States in a permanent state of incarceration. This an important issue because it affects the everyday lives of people around the nation. Alexander looks in detail at what economists normally miss—the entire legal structure of the courts, parole, probation and laws that effectively turn a person who may have done the crime into a person who is unworthy or “incapable” of rehabilitation. Alexander does a wonderful job of telling the truth, and blaming the right people, who can be liberal or conservative, white or black, who inflict this injustice on others. Alexander’s writing, however, does lack a structure that the reader can follow, which ultimately weakens her overall case.