Michelle Alexander - The New Jim Crow
In “The New Jim Crow”, author Michelle Alexander argues that the war on drugs is just an excuse to target African Americans and keep millions of black people in poverty or in jail. Alexander thinks that racism is still very prevalent in today’s world. She believes that the criminal justice system uses the system of mass incarceration to control black people and exclude them from the political process. Many African American people are not allowed to vote because they have gone to jail and they are labeled felons for life. Alexander claims that both the war on drugs and mass incarceration contribute to the rebirth of caste system in America which puts African Americans into an inferior position in society.
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The main one is the war on drugs. Large amount of people are arrested every year due to drug offense. However, many African Americans’ rights were taken away during the process. For example, the Fourth Amendment, which is supposed to protect citizens from unreasonable search and seizure. Police adopted the “stop-and -frisk” tactic that violates the Fourth Amendment. The “stop-and-frisk” tactic allows police officers to stop and search a person who they think is suspicious without probable cause. Police officers get to decide who is suspicious based on the way a person dresses, walks and skin color. The “stop-and-frisk” tactic puts a huge amount of black people in jail which supports the statistic that 90% of drug felons are African Americans. Also, black people are associated with crack cocaine because crack cocaine is more attainable than powdered cocaine and black people who lives in the ghetto only have access to crack cocaine. Unfortunately, the police punishes crack cocaine more harshly than powdered cocaine and powdered cocaine is associated with white people. Alexander argues that this is another discriminatory tactic that allows the criminal justice system to give African Americans harsher