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Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness By Michelle Alexander

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Recommended: Essays on war on drugs

For this semester, we read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. The book talks about how minorities face, especially black men, being treated like second-class citizens by the criminal justice system and this leading to our modern mass incarceration problem. Alexander goes as far as to say “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it” (2). This is shown by the War on Drugs. The idea of race and other concepts that have to do with race were thought up by white people to create a divide between them and other races. This was used to justified their treatment of African Americans and killing of the Native Americans (23). This allowed white people to create a supremacy where they were on top despite the fact that the Constitution is considered colorblind (25). Eventually the populist party, the party that supported blacks as equals, was getting popular. This caused the south to create Jim Crow laws to segregate black people despite giving them the same rights as white people (33-34). The court case, Brown v. Board of Education ended the Jim Crow laws (35). Due to not legally being able to segregate black people, conservatives decided to use law …show more content…

The labeling effect is when somebody comes out of prison or jail, but are still seen as a criminal because they went to prison or jail. The law allows former criminals to be deny for housing or jobs on the basis that they were in prison or jail (144). This leads to people who are labeled to have a hard time getting jobs, a home, and being part of the community as they are seen as bad people (141). Since the War on Drugs puts so many poor black people in prison, we have make people with already difficult lives, lives more difficult. This could potentially lead to the person doing more crime as they may feel like they have little choice on what to do since everyone sees them as a

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The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is known as one of the most important books of out time. This is a book that makes the reader appreciate the magnitude of the crisis faced by communities of color as a result of mass incarceration. As noted, this book is not for everyone. It’s for people who are interested in seeing the injustice that many people of color have to face in the United States. In this book, we will see many similarities about our criminal justice system and something that looks and feels like the era of Jim Crow, an era we supposedly left behind.

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Alexander argues that the system perpetuates a form of racial control akin to the Jim Crow laws of the past, primarily through the mass incarceration of Black men. She examines how policies such as the War on Drugs disproportionately target and incarcerate Black communities, creating a cycle of poverty and disenfranchisement. Through

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The book was written by Michelle Alexander, who is a civil rights litigator as well as a legal scholar and the book talks about discrimination against other minorities. The principal premise of the book is that the current mass incarceration is the New Jim Crow. The author tries to show that the perception among Americans that discrimination mostly ended with the civil rights reforms of the 1960s is wrong. She points to the criminal justice system as the new Jim Crow, using the War on Drugs as the primary tool to enforce old and new forms of repression and discrimination. The new kind of racism has led the country to have the highest rate of incarceration in the world and most of those imprisoned are Black Americans.

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ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, M. (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Rev. ed.). New York, NY: The New Press. Michelle Alexander in her book, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" argues that law enforcement officials routinely racially profile minorities to deny them socially, politically, and economically as was accustomed in the Jim Crow era.

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In an interview with Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, she claims that mass incarceration is a new version of the Jim Crow laws that were initially enacted in the nineteenth and twentieth century. These laws were set into place in order to enforce segregation between black and white citizens. Jim Crow was supposed to have ended in the 1964 with the Civil Rights Act, however Alexander believes that current society has been using “the war on drugs” as a tactic to discriminate against black people thus continuing the ideas of the racial segregation. Though congress may have passed the Civils Right Act, that has not stopped society from racial profiling each other and discriminating as they see fit. Black citizens continue to face

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Annotated Bibliography Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Alexander opens up on the history of the criminal justice system, disciplinary crime policy and race in the U.S. detailing the ways in which crime policy and mass incarceration have worked together to continue the reduction and defeat of black Americans.

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This idea is echoed in Alexander’s article, as she states, “Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws… and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race,” both during and following prison (Alexander 2010, 8). The financial adversity and discrimination that Tracy encounters during his job interview experience emboldens Alexander’s argument that incarceration disadvantages black people economically, socially, and politically in

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Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow is a truly thought provoking book attempting to show the enduring issues of racial inequalities in our Criminal Justice system. Racial inequality in America is a huge and controversial topic, especially in reference to America’s system of Criminal justice. In “The New Jim Crow” Alexander focuses on the racial undertones of America’s “War on drugs”. Alexander uses the chapters of her book to take us on a journey through America’s racial history and argues that the federal drug policy unjustly targets black communities.

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In this article, the authors examine the research of how the criminal justice system forms racial profiling in the United States as incarceration increases. The authors use longitudinal data to find information of how one’s skin color can affect one’s punishments compared to someone who is white due to the stereotypes that revolve around their race. As they further investigate they found that “there is a stereotypical link between race and crime” (Saperstein et al., 2014) as arrest and the consequences associated with the crime are increased to people who are minorities. The article strongly suggests an extensive impact on increased policing and rise of incarceration on racialization and stereotyping with results of groups, police judgments

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Michelle Alexander, similarly, points out the same truth that African American men are targeted substantially by the criminal justice system due to the long history leading to racial bias and mass incarceration within her text “The New Jim Crow”. Both Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Michelle Alexander’s text exhibit the brutality and social injustice that the African American community experiences, which ultimately expedites the mass incarceration of African American men, reflecting the current flawed prison system in the U.S. The American prison system is flawed in numerous ways as both King and Alexander points out. A significant flaw that was identified is the injustice of specifically targeting African American men for crimes due to the racial stereotypes formed as a result of racial formation. Racial formation is the accumulation of racial identities and categories that are formed, reconstructed, and abrogated throughout history.

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An institutional racism still faced both past and present can be found in incarceration and racial profiling. Our prison populations have skyrocketed since the 80 's and there is a disproportionate amount of black and Latino individuals who are incarcerated. Between New York’s stop and frisk policies and the insurmountable amounts of unarmed black and Latino men who are shot by police the discrimination by the police and law enforcement is clearly evident. Although black and Latino drivers are less likely than white to be carrying drug and other contraband the majority of car pulled over are the cars of black and Latino divers. The racial profiling is just one reason for the disproportionate black and Latino prison population.

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Discussion 8 My observation, regarding continuing racial inequality, would be the overwhelming population of African Americans in the prison I recently toured. I was standing alongside my Criminal Law professor, and we were both commenting about the racial disparity. No doubt, the men who are in prison have done something to be there, but are their crimes any less heinous than any other man arrested for the same offense, but given less time? Labels and selective perception plays a significant role in the placing of certain individuals in “boxes.”

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The Labeling theory also addresses those who are already criminals who continue to be. Once someone commits a criminal act, he or she is remembered for it. Depending upon the act, others might see this person as lower or unwanted. In severe cases, they might even be feared in the community they live in. This is called retrospective reading, and is defined more in detail by Larry Siegel in his Criminology:

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