Analysis Of The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander

Author’s argument #1
In her book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander uses a large-scale historical analysis to conceptualize the intractable failures of the American incarceration system. Central to her overall argument is the claim that the prison system was intentionally designed to perpetuate the discrimination and social death of Black people in an era where laws permit outright anti-Black legislation. In order to support her historical analysis of the motivation behind the carceral system, Alexander traces the fall of formally racist institutions to modern legislation that, she argues, accomplishes the same goal without using explicitly racist language. Alexander engages in a three-step investigation into the process that transformed

If, as Alexander suggests, the prison system will always be racist and designed to harm people of color, the end goal for repairing these injustices must be the abolition of prison — even a reformed version of prison would have the same racism at its core.
Alexander’s account of the Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs serves as chilling evidence to support the claim that the carceral system is inherently racist. Incontrovertibly, White resentment toward Black Americans did not dissipate after Jim Crow. Identifying the (obvious) vitriol that remained among White as an effective way to motivate a voting Bloc, Presidential candidates such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan began campaigning for a so-called War on Drugs. Outwardly, this surge in rhetoric about drug crime was a call to protect people in cities from the dangers of drugs. Inside the war room, however, politicians understood the racist missions behind a firm carceral response to drug use. As Nixons’s chief domestic advisor John Ehrlichman admitted: by associating Black people with hard drugs like crack and heroin and

3). Time and time again, however, the introduction of community policing has only served to divert taxpayer money away from valuable institutions and toward police without changing the relationship between the police and the communities they infiltrate. By nature, adding police to a situation creates hostility — individuals in communities that have been fragmented by mass incarceration know far too well that so long as police officers are present, there is a chance they get shot or go to prison. Situations that would never have escalated in a typical situation often result in arrests and violence. As a man in Prison by Any Other Name recounts, community policing gives officers opportunities to harass people for as little as “tossing a paper plate on the floor.” Even worse, police presence opens up the possibility of violence in community spaces that ought to be safe. That same man witnessed cops tossing one of his neighbors on the cement because he was gambling (Schenwar and Law p. 4). As these examples of the presence of police in the community suggest, rather than making police interactions less hostile, community policing just creates more opportunities for escalation and violence.