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

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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 …show more content…

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

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Michelle Alexander argues in her introduction to the New Jim Crow that the racial caste in America has not ended and that it just has been redesigned. She highlights the ways that the justice system of the United States controls blacks through deliberately imposed legal restrictions. The United States has the leading incarceration rates in the world and most of the individuals involved with the country’s correctional system are African-American men. This essay seeks to discuss the author’s overall argument in the book. The essay will also discuss how the topics in the first three chapters of the book help Alexander develop this argument.

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973 Words | 4 Pages

It also highlights the connection of racial injustice to the war on drugs and the Jim Crow eras and their manifestation within the social justice system. The analogies and analysis provided throughout these chapters really gave me insight into the function of racial injustice and systems of oppression in the criminal justice

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Synopsis In the introduction, Michelle Alexander (2010) introduces herself and expresses her passion about the topic of how the criminal justice system accomplishes racial hierarchy here in the United States. In chapter 1 of The New Jim Crow, Alexander (2010) suggests that the federal government can no longer be trusted to make any effort to enforce black civil rights legislation, especially when the Drug War is aimed at racial and ethnic minorities. In response to revolts formed between black slaves and white indentured servants, rich whites extended special privileges to their indentured servants that drove a wedge between them and the slaves that successfully stopped the revolts.

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Alexander focuses on how African American communities have become more vulnerable to the arrests. Authorities will target these communities even though this is not where the crime is happening. Lastly, many people are labeled ‘felons’ for life, even though they have only committed one victimless crime. Michelle Alexander summarizes her opinion by saying, “We have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it.” Even though America has taken many small steps to move forward from segregation, black individuals are locked up behind bars and will struggle for the rest of their lives to escape from the ‘felon’ title.

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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

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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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652 Words | 3 Pages

In the article, The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, she explores a subject that most people ignore; that is a racial caste system exists in America. Specifically, she asserts that mass incarceration is a new racial caste system which provides context for the political, social and economic problems, represents the New Jim Crow. In post Jim Crow society, Alexander empathizes, we have adopted to the colorblind perspective, which states that race is not being justified for discrimination or social contempt. Instead of relying on race, we use our criminal justice system to label colored people as criminals. Once we labeled them as criminals, all forms of discrimination will be legal against people of color.

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Her central thesis is that mass incarceration is “The New Jim Crow,” or the new system of control used by the government to uphold racial class in the U.S. This book will be helpful to my research because it directly discusses the topic of race and the criminal justice system. Amnesty International. (2003). United States of America: Death by discrimination

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It focuses on how the criminal justice system has been used to disproportionately target and control people of color,

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We live in a society where ethnic minorities are target for every minimal action and/or crimes, which is a cause to be sentenced up to 50 years in jail. African Americans and Latinos are the ethnic minorities with highest policing crimes. In chapter two of Michelle Alexander’s book, The Lockdown, we are exposed to the different “crimes” that affects African American and Latino minorities. The criminal justice system is a topic discussed in this chapter that argues the inequality that people of color as well as other Americans are exposed to not knowing their rights. Incarceration rates, unreasonable suspicions, and pre-texts used by officers are things that play a huge role in encountering the criminal justice system, which affects the way

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THESIS Today, many would say that we live in a “post-racial society” but this is not the case for the millions of black and brown individuals living in America. In this book, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor points out the many modern examples of systematic oppression that many African Americans are currently facing in our daily lives. SUMMARY In this book, Taylor points out the exhausting and angering struggles that the Black community face. She talks about the corrupt “justice” system that locks up millions of African Americans, she discusses that the country is in fact a “colorblind” society that often tries to dismiss racism as a thing of the past, she brings attention to the poverty and unemployment rates in the African American community, and

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983 Words | 4 Pages

In her book, The New Jim Crow Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander who was a civil rights lawyer and legal scholar, reveals many of America’s harsh truths regarding race within the criminal justice system. Though the Jim Crow laws have long been abolished, a new form has surfaced, a contemporary system of racial control through mass incarceration. In this book, mass incarceration not only refers to the criminal justice system, but also a bigger picture, which controls criminals both in and out of prison through laws, rules, policies and customs. The New Jim Crow that Alexander speaks of has redesigned the racial caste system, by putting millions of mainly blacks, as well as Hispanics and some whites, behind bars

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1721 Words | 7 Pages

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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One of the biggest controversies in society today is concerning whether or not the criminal justice system is racially bias. It is clear that blacks are overrepresented in America’s prison system. For example, they are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of white people and “constitute for nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population” (Criminal Justice). Although this is true, the disproportionate number of black men serving time in the criminal justice system is due to circumstance, not necessarily race. While there are some judges, police officers, or other officials who may have a racial bias towards black people, in the majority of cases blacks are not arrested because their race, they are arrested because they

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Chapter seven dealt extensively with race and racial prejudice, issues that most people would like to see eradicated, but some still believe to be ever present. Souryal’s literature, which deals with real life situations as well as theory behind it, presents some interesting but unfortunate cases where people are mistreated or biased against for nothing more than their race. Racial prejudice is wrong and shouldn’t have any bearing on the justice system, but unfortunately—due to things like racial profiling—there are still cases where a precedent is set and police act, either consciously or unconsciously, against minorities instead of criminals. Strange concepts, such as justifiable inequality, were explained—this, in particular, was a concept I knew nothing about before reading Souryal’s chapter on it. The chapter also went into great depth about serious issues like discrimination and stereotyping, especially how stereotypes about minorities, which are perpetrated by a very small percentage of them, lead to police misconduct and police stereotypes that hurt many upstanding citizens who are black or Latino.

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