The New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration

The election of Barack Obama as the 56th president of the United States raised many hopes that the “Black struggles” was finally over. For conservatives, Obama victory reassured their beliefs that there was no longer such thing as racism and that every American had equal rights and opportunity to pursue the American dream. While many people have come to believe that all races have equal rights in America, Tim Wise argues in his documentary “White Like Me” that not only does racism and unconscious racial bias still exist, but that also White Americans are unable to simply relate to the variety of forms racism and inequality Blacks experience. This is mainly because of the privileges they get as the “default.” While Wise explores the variety forms of racism and inequality today such as unconscious racism, Black poverty, unemployment, inadequate education system, and prison system, the articles by the New York Times Editorial Board, the Human Rights Watch (HRW), and Adam Liptak further explore some the disparities in the criminal justice system. Ana Swanson points out in her article, “The Stubborn Persistence of Black-White Inequality, 50 Years after Selma” that while the “U.S. has made big strides towards equal rights,” significant gaps still remains between the two races. With the Supreme Court striking down a “portion of the Voting Rights Act that stopped discriminatory voting laws from going into effect in areas of the country with histories of disenfranchisement,” civil

Mass Incarceration of African American men has become a social injustice of our time. It can also be proclaimed to be known as a civil rights issue of our time. From the first time Africans were taken from their homeland and stripped of all human rights to become slaves, they- or we perhaps- have never truly possessed any real social justice. What does mass incarceration really mean to our black America? How does it affect our communities? When we really look at it, mass incarceration means a lot more than being placed in the back of a police car with handcuffs clinching your bones. It means a lot more than sitting in a jail or prison cell waiting for your time to be served.

Legal inequality is an injustice that people of color have been subject to for years. In the US, racial discrimination against people of color in the justice system such as mass incarceration and racial profiling generates a wide variety of public issues that influence the life possibilities of the Latino and Black communities. Laws were created in an effort to ensure the safety and stability of everyone everywhere. With that being said, however, the laws did and do not always have the best interest of certain races in mind. In the book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration and Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander discusses legal inequality in relation to race by asserting that the legal system discriminates against people of color, specifically African Americans, just like they were treated during the Jim Crow era. Legal Equality can be defined as individuals having the same resources and rights available to them equally and on the same level, regardless of race. This paper will argue that the U.S. legal system targets people of color through incarceration, the War on Drugs, and racial segregation.

The video we were asked to write a reflection on discussed The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness which is a book written by Michelle Alexander a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate and Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University. Michelle Alexander states that although we made tremendous progress with Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s by unifying as a race and fought to seemingly ended the old Jim Crow era by the passing of laws such as the 1965 voting act and Brown V.S Board Of Education which overturned Plessey V.S Ferguson; African Americans went through horrifying ordeals to destroy the old Jim Crow system but it was never eructated but in actuality redesigned in the form of our criminal justice system; but before expounding on Alexander’s New Jim Crow it is essential to discuss what exactly The Old Jim Crow was.

Throughout the semester, we have discussed many different issues that are currently prevalent in the United States, specifically those related to racial discrimination. One specific issue that I have developed interest and research in is that of institutionalized racism, specifically in the form of mass incarceration, and what kinds of effects mass incarceration has on a community. In this paper, I will briefly examine a range of issues surrounding the mass incarceration of black and Latino males, the development of a racial undercaste because of rising incarceration rates, women and children’s involvement and roles they attain in the era of mass incarceration, and the economic importance that the prison system has due to its

One of the primary evidences of this fact is the book written by author Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. This book speaks on how old habits die-hard and how difficult it is to banish deep-rooted social norms. She states, “The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capital, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison” (2012, p. 16). This may be an eye-opening statement for some to read, however, it is a reality we have lived with since the start of time, just in different a context.

After reading both The New Jim Crow and the article on the myth os mass incarceration,

While segregation through Jim Crow laws was judged unconstitutional decades ago, the African American community is still trapped in a second-class status much like their grandparents. With a better understanding of the dehumanizing and discriminatory nature of mass incarceration, future generations may eradicate the disregard for basic human

Michelle Alexander in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, discusses the preservation of racial subordination in the United States. While the abolition of slavery following the American Civil War freed all slaves, the institution left an enduring impact on society, especially the impression of white male supremacy. Consequently, the development of Jim Crow Laws preserved the racial segregation of former slaves under a more “civilized caste system.” After nearly a century of fighting against the new system of subordination, African Americans were freed again upon the lift of the Jim Crow Laws. Despite the hundred years since the abolition of slavery, white resentment and wrath still remained which helped

The book Race, Incarceration, and American Values describes mass incarceration as essentially a legalized form of genocide that is slowly destroying the fiber of African American families and communities. It provides explanations for the origin of mass incarceration as well as the reasons for the disproportionate level of African Americans in the prison system. Glenn Loury, along with Pamela Karian, Tommie Shelby, and Loic Wacquant discuss how America has let fear and greed cause an inequitable landscape for citizens who have the misfortune of being born the wrong color and of the wrong social-economic class. The principals of equality and freedom on which America was founded has become nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Maybe the pride America displays to the World as a Global power incapable of wrong doing is what is holding it back from recognizing the mistakes it made and undergoing to process of change. Or, maybe it is what we fear most. It is what we know in our heads and hearts; but never dared to say. That it is a careful crafted system to keep those with power in power!

Our history, African Americans, is a unique one; it is one that can be described in a various amount of ways. However, no matter who you ask, the topic of slavery will arise, bringing forth the ideology of Jim Crow Laws then the infamous Civil Rights Movement, and presently we are enduring the issue of mass incarceration. Unlike slavery and Jim Crow, mass incarceration has not experienced a death phase. It seems as if, each time a method, to keep a certain ethnicity of people oppressed, fails another method rising to the challenge. In my opinion, mass incarceration is one that will be more difficult to overcome then the others. I hate to admit it, but W.E.B Du Bois’s statement remains true, “[T]he slave went free; stood a brief moment in the

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 modern time the United States is home to 2,193,798 incarcerated inmates. That is 645,300 people more than the second leading nation with mass incarceration. But the issue isn't about a person being caught for minor crimes or crimes in general, the problem is that police officers are mainly targeting minorities and throwing them in jail for minor crimes such as loitering. Some people see this mass incarceration of minorities as a threat to not only minorities but to a country full of injustice. And every president who has so-called try to help decline mass incarceration across the nation or to make our country great again have in fact made the situation worse than it was before. African Americans, Latinos, and Hispanics have always been targeted by police officers and only because of their skin color for looking “suspicious of having a weapon” but we can change that. We can have our police officers open their eyes and actually see who they're targeting and who really is the bad guy in this whole dilemma.

America is a very unequal country, especially for different ethnic types. African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people even though they only make up less than a quarter of the US population. The incarceration rate in the United States has grown so dramatically since the 1970’s and the USA now has one of the highest rates in the world. The rise in incarceration has been especially prominent among young black males and high school dropouts. 37% of those who are young black males and high school dropouts are now in prison or jail, a rate that’s more than what prevailed in 1980. However, this can be unfair because sometimes blacks and Hispanics move away from poverty in their own country’s to America so that they can have the American dream but do not achieve it no matter how hard they work because of discrimination. Evidence of discrimination incudes the fact that the handing out of prison sentences and arrests are higher in group’s other than whites. In New York City, where people of colour make up about half of the population, 80%

In 1814, Francis Scott Key, a slaveholding attorney from an old Maryland plantation proclaimed our nation “the land of the free.” And coined the term, “all men are created equal (Wilson, 2016).” But why is it that our nation currently holds more than 2.2 million people in cages? According to Roy Walmsley who is the Director of the World Prison Brief for the International Center on Prison Studies, cites “The U.S. comprises just 5 percent of the world’s population, but incarcerates almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners (Wamsley,2015).” The rise in imprisonment has disproportionately affected minority groups, such as African Americans and Latinos leading to confinement, probation or parole. But what is mass incarceration? According to the Oxford Bibliographies, “mass incarceration is a phenomenon that refers to the current American experiment in incarceration, which is defined by comparatively and historically extreme rates of imprisonment and by the concentration of imprisonment among young, African American men” (Wildeman,2012). As a result, a culture of punishment, combined with race and class based hostility, has led the United States to rely on incarceration more heavily than any other country in the world. According to Michelle Alexander, who wrote, The New Jim Crow, explains that African Americans are admitted to state prison on drug charges more than thirteen times higher rate than white men (Alexander, pp 100, 2012). In addition, 1 in every 14 black men