The New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration

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.

As a legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, blatant racism is no longer viewed as acceptable social behavior. However, the absence of blatant individual racism cannot be equated to the absence of structural racial discrimination. With the Thirteenth Amendment preserving slavery as punishment in the prison system, criminality is being manipulated by the media to be associated with race. We see the full effects of the overrepresentation with War on Drugs legislation, which are policies that categorized drug use as a crime instead of health issue pushed forward by the Reagan administration. The master narrative of the criminality painted the legislation as colorblind, or nondiscriminatory, policies that will benefit all citizens and created

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.

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.

Alexander claims that the sole reason that the war on drugs was started was to maintain the racist nature that faces America. Alexander realizes that even though the Jim Crow Laws were eradicated, we have just reshaped the ways in which we decide to ruin lives. As the old adage says, “The more things change, the more they remain the same”. I think to a certain point Americans need to have reassurance that things really are changing and here’s where Jim Crow ends, but in the background the powerful people in this country had to come up with a new plan to feed their racist nature. One politician after another want to show how tough they can be on drugs. Each wanting to be stronger than the other. They didn’t care who they were hurting on the bottom, as long as they looked extra tough.

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.

I had first heard about Michelle Alexander’s engaging, yet sobering, book about two years ago from a very good friend of mine, who suggested that I read it immediately. I would see it on bookstore shelves and at online stores and I would always tell myself that I would “get it next time”. But, after reading the introduction of the book, for this class, I immediately purchased a copy online and once it arrived I moved it to the top of my reading list. Michelle Alexander does a commendable job of distilling the abstract ideal of a Prison Industrial Complex into something palpable; exploring more about the societal implications of mass incarceration in our country as opposed to the political. It also raises important questions, such as, why do we as American’s feel comfortable with the incarceration of large groups of our population predicated along racial lines? The answer, while multi-faceted, can be

Undoubtedly, race defines nearly aspect of the criminal justice system, from police profiling/targeting, to crimes charged and sentencing, to rates of conviction and incarceration. Blacks and Latinos make up sixty-three percent of the prison population while only making up a quarter of the total population (Hunter & Wagner, 2011). According to Michelle Alexander (in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, “More black people are in prison or jail, on probation or on parole than were enslaved in 1850”, despite the fact that whites and blacks engage in criminal activities, especially drug offenses, at roughly comparable rates (2010). Historically, there has been a tendency to strip black and brown bodies of their humanity,

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

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.

The New Jim Crow is a book that discusses how legal practices and the American justice system are harming the African American community as a whole, and it argues that racism, though hidden, is still alive and well in our society because of these practices. In the book, Michelle Alexander, author and legal scholar, argues that legal policies against offenders have kept and continue to keep black men from becoming first class citizens, and she writes that by labeling them as “criminals,” the justice system and society in general is able to act with prejudice against them and subordinate black Americans who were previously incarcerated, on probation, or on parole, by limiting their access to services as a result of their ‘criminal status’ and therefore, further degrading their quality of life. The New Jim Crow urges readers to acknowledge the injustice and racial disparity of our criminal justice system so that this new, more covert form of racism in society can be stopped.

The introduction of book starts with how she starts to write this book. When she started her job at ACLU, she realized that our criminal justice system has racial bias against minorities. Most importantly, she realized that incarceration is legal racial separation which is illegal. Great example of legal racial separation is drug war. Drug war was in 1980s to1990s. As drug war started, some black communities believe that drug war was targeting black people. This did not bear out exactly as stated, but the guerilla armies that the CIA supported in Nicaragua did bring in drugs to inner-city neighborhoods. The drug war decline the use of illegal drugs. But, our incarceration rate went up highest throughout the world. This incarceration rate was mostly African Americans. Though all races use similar number of drugs, African Americans’ incarceration rate was Twenty-five times higher than white. This racial bias exist not only for drug war incarceration, but also in crime rate and punishments. She pointed out that our panel system is “social control unparalleled in the world.” Now days, one in three African Americans sentenced be in

Michelle Alexander talks about racial justice and mass incarceration in The New Jim Crow. There is such a high rate of incarceration in the United States. The drug war today is doomed to fail, especially because drugs dealers will replace one another. This war consists of drug related crimes and violence. Suspects of drug wars are racially discriminated by law enforcement officials. Most dealers and users are white. Three out of four of imprisoners for drug offenders are Latino or African American. Police subject the poor and look into ghettos for drugs. In the 1980s, police officers focused on white crack users rather than black, later shifted its attention and gave everyone