Summary Of The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander

Throughout chapters four, five and six of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, I gained a better understanding of the legacy of the war on drugs era policy and the function of the forms of oppression in the criminal justice system. In chapter four, Alexander focuses on the roles and legacy of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. She conveys the fact that although newly freed incarcerated people may have more rights overall, they still arguably have less respect than newly freed enslaved people who were living ‘freely’ in Mississippi at the peak of the Jim Crow Era (Alexander 2010). She goes on to say that although Jim Crow may have been outlawed, new signs have gone up targeting society’s new legal form of second class citizens

The second challenge would be mitigating the harm from colorblind policies and reform efforts. Alexander highlights that these colorblind policies are surface level and intentionally ignore systematic issues in the criminal justice system, but they are widely used because they are easier to get legislative support in comparison to policies that call for more radical systematic changes. A solution I propose, as I did in previous discussions based on the analysis of The New Jim Crow and other CRT theorists, is abolition and a new system that’s rid of systematic racism to be instituted. In conclusion, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow provides a deeper understanding of racial disparities in the criminal justice system. 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