Review Of Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness By Michelle Alexander

Introduction In the world we live in it seems as though no matter how many rules or legislation that is made there will always be some form of racial disparity under disguise. This critique will be an exploration of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. Alexander is civil rights lawyer and advocate in the United States that has been writing books since the early 2000’s and has become an opinion columnist for The New York Times in 2018. As an African American much of her work has been involved in the push for civil rights and racial equality in the world. Her thesis for the book is that the criminal justice system in the United States has brought back the disparity in race that was first experienced

The first chapter looks at how the racial caste system came to be in the United States as a way of controlling labor. The second chapter looks at how the system has slowly evolved throughout history and the impact that the civil rights movement has had in affecting that evolution. It also looks at how supreme court decisions in the past hundred years have changed the way officers have been allowed to act. The third chapter looks at the idea that the justice system has become a means for class control. In particularly in the form of the “War on Drugs” creating a disproportionate amount of people of color incarcerated for nonviolent offenses and how police departments are financially incentivized to prioritize their efforts towards drug offenses. The fourth chapter explores how the system of mass incarceration affects African American communities both during incarceration and after being released with the title of being a felon. The fifth chapter is where the author explains the title of the book, being the idea of how the “Age of Colorblindness” has created a world where the discrimination is harder to witness from the outside since it is under the disguise of the criminal justice system. This chapter also compares the potential for harm in the modern system to the harm that came from the Jim Crow laws. The sixth and final chapter explores the ideas of how the status quo in society makes it harder to dismantle the system of mass