Race, Incarceration, And American Values Essay

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.

Overall, the United States prison system and society’s view of African Americans needs to change. People need to make sure that the mistakes society has made in the past do not repeat themselves. In order to fix many of the existing problems it is important to focus on reforming the prison system. Doing so would prevent many future cases of injustice and racial

The United States features a prison population that is more than quadruple the highest prison population in Western Europe (Pettit, 2004). In the 1980s, U.S. legislation issued a number of new drug laws with stiffer penalties that ranged from drug possession to drug trafficking. Many of those charged with drug crimes saw longer prison sentences and less judicial leniency when facing trial. The War on Drugs has furthered the boom in prison population even though violent crime has continued to decrease steadily. Many urban areas in the U.S. have a majority black population. With crime tendencies high in these areas, drugs are also prevalent. This means that a greater percentage of those in prison are going to be black because law

Racism in the United States has not remained the same over time since its creation. Racism has shifted, changed, and shaped into unrecognizable ways that fit into the fabric of the American society to render it nearly invisible to the majority of Americans. Michelle Alexander, in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness shatters this dominantly held belief. The New Jim Crow makes a reader profoundly question whether the high rates of incarceration in the United States is an attempt to maintain blacks as an underclass. Michelle Alexander makes the assertion that “[w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it” using the criminal justice system and colorblind rhetoric. (Alexander 2). The result is a population of Black and Latino men who face barriers and deprivation of rights as did Blacks during the Jim Crow era. Therefore, mass incarceration has become the new Jim Crow.

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander develops a compelling analogy on how mass incarceration is similar to the Jim Crow era, and is a “race-making institution.” She begins her work with the question, “Where have all the black men gone?” (Alexander, 178) She demonstrates how the media and Obama have failed to give an honest answer to this question, that the large majority of them or in prison. She argues that in order to address this problem, we must be honest about the fact that this is happening, and the discrimination with the African American communities that is putting them there.

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

The “War on Drugs” established that the impact of incarceration would be used as a weapon to combat the illegal drug problem in this country. Unfortunately, this war against drugs has fallen disproportionately on black Americans. “Blacks constitute 62.6% of all drug offenders admitted to state prisons in 1996, whereas whites constituted 36.7%. The drug offender admissions rate for black men ranges from 60 to an astonishing 1,146 per 100,000 black men. In contrast, the white rate begins at 6 and rises no higher than 139 per 100,000 white men. Drug offenses accounted for nearly two out of five of all black admissions to state prisons (Human Rights Watch, 2000).” The disproportionate rates at which black drug offenders are sent to prison originate in racially disproportionate rates of arrest.

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander tries to advance intellectual dialogue regarding mass incarceration in the United States. Alexander does this by carrying out a historical analysis of the process in which the correctional system controls African Americans through intentionally selected, and systematically sanctioned legal limits. In fact, the United States incarceration rate is not at peak by coincidence. Moreover, it is not coincidental that Black men and women make up the majority of this number. According to Alexander, this problem is a consequence of the “New Jim Crow” rules, which use racial stratification to eliminate black individuals in the legal sense. Black people and a small number of the Hispanic community face racial stratified laws when they face the justice system. This paper will support the claims that race is a major factor in the incarceration of black men in the United States, which includes the Jim Crow system, the slave system and the drag war. This process will also involve analyzing of some of the arguments presented within the book.

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

Mass incarceration the United States has pervasive effects on minority populations. Having disproportionately high rates of minorities in prison has negatively affected the communities that are left behind. “After moderately stable rates for most of the twentieth century, the number of Americans in prison or jail accelerated so rapidly starting in the 1970s that legal scholars widely use the phrase mass incarceration to describe its scale,” . The effects span across generations and are largely unstudied. The long-term implications of mass incarcerations cannot be fully understood because we still have a large population of prisoners in the United States compared to other countries.

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness goes into great detail on race related issues that were specific to black males, the mass incarceration, and how that lead to the development of institutionalized racism in the United States. She compares the Jim Crow with recent phenomenon of mass incarceration and points out that the mass incarceration is a network of laws, policies, customs and institutions that have been working together to warrant the subordinating status of black males. In this paper I will go into a brief examination of the range of issues that she mentions in her book that are surrounding the mass incarceration of black male populations.

Of the supplementary readings provided, I found “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration” by Loïc Wacquant the most intriguing. This particular article is based on “rethinking the ‘race question’ in the US” and the disproportionate institutions set apart for African Americans in the United States. The volatile beginnings of African Americans presented obvious hardships for future advancement, but Wacquant argues that they still suffer from a form of modern slavery.

The rate of incarceration of black people specifically males has been a constant increase. The United States of America mass incarceration began in the 1970s and it now holds the highest number of inmates in the world. There has been a racial and ethnic disproportionality within the Justice system, as 35% of African-American males are represented of all inmates, that is 3,119 per 100,000 a year (Gjelsvik, Dora, Dumont & Nunn, 2013, p. 1). The mass imprisonment of black males has major effects on their family development and the communities in which they come from. This has brought upon many social activist and agencies to demand strategic reforms to minimize the disproportionality in black inmates.