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Summary Of The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander

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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. The New Jim Crow is an account of a caste-like system, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied …show more content…

She points out that in some states, 80-90% of those sent to prison on drug charges are African American. This enormous discrepancy cannot be blamed either on black culture or “old-fashioned,” deliberate racism. Rather, much of the racial injustice of mass incarceration can in fact be attributed to unconscious bias. This is made worse by laws that may appear to be race-neutral on the surface, but in fact operate in deeply racist ways; this includes the one hundred-to-one ratio in sentencing recommendations for crack versus powder cocaine. Whereas there is little substantial difference between the two forms of cocaine, crack is more closely associated with black people—and carries sentences a hundred times longer than powder cocaine, which is generally associated with wealthy whites. Meanwhile, black people are often barred from serving on juries as a result of bizarre (yet ostensibly race-neutral) rules, meaning that many African Americans are tried by all-white juries.The deep racism of mass incarceration has been instituted through two broad steps: first, by giving law enforcement “extraordinary discretion” in who and how they approach, and second, by refusing to accept any charges of racism that do not identify a particular racist individual as the source of the problem. Alexander points out that anti-drug policy is particularly likely to be racially discriminatory because drugs are handled in a manner unlike any other crime. When an ordinary crime takes place, the victim (or someone acting on the victim’s behalf) alerts the authorities—the first step in the process of achieving justice. In the case of drugs, there isn’t a victim as such; both the buyer and seller of drugs have no incentive to call the police. Furthermore, most Americans of all races have violated drug laws at least once in their lives, and it would clearly be undesirable to put the majority of

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“The New Jim Crow” Summary “The New Jim Crow” was written by Michelle Alexander based off of her experience working for the ACLU of Oakland in which she saw racial bias in the justice system that constituted people of color second-class citizens; Which is why the comparison had been made to the Jim Crow laws that existed in the nineteenth century. Alexander notes comparisons in white resentment, colorblind language, segregation in neighborhoods, legal discrimination, etc., while the difference are the lack of activism that is shown in response to these injustices. Goes over the entire history of slavery; Documenting the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws, and then the civil rights movement to the War on Drugs that Reagan, in 1980, began in order

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Just like the new Jim Crow, it was put into a new form that is much harder for an African American to see. Nowadays, it does not affect people that are not of color anymore, but towards African Americans. Since the new Jim Crow exists, there are movements to stop the growth of racial profiling and race base thinking. #BlackLivesMatter is a movement that is attempting a society where we are

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Jim Crow was not a person, it was a series of laws that imposed legal segregation between white Americans and African Americans in the American South. It promoting the status “Separate but Equal”, but for the African American community that was not the case. African Americans were continuously ridiculed, and were treated as inferiors. Although slavery was abolished in 1865, the legal segregation of white Americans and African Americans was still a continuing controversial subject and was extended for almost a hundred years (abolished in 1964). Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South is a series of primary accounts of real people who experienced this era first-hand and was edited by William H.Chafe, Raymond

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Steven stated, “We didn't have to incarcerate people for 10, 20, 30, 40 years for simple possession of marijuana, for drug use. We didn't have to do that. We made choices around that. And now the consequences are devastating” (Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander, 2010). As can be seen, prosecutorial misconduct is a reflection of the justice system to dehumanize African Americans, which led to a punishment that did not fit the crime and the unlawful use of racial justice to incarcerate African American longer than white people.

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It is a well known fact that history repeats itself. This entangling cycle of repetition can be witnessed in the constant racist and prejudice state of American society. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander is able to bring to light the mistake people have been making through the process of repeating history, this mistake being the repeated use of racism and prejudice to successfully segregate society in order to accomplish a goal. Accordingly, during the time of slavery, a white lower class man by the name Nathaniel Bacon started a rebellion, uniting the poor whites and the blacks against the white elite. In response to this, the white elite used the repeated tactic of segregating whites from blacks and in their vulnerable state, gave

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She first supports her claim by chronicling America 's history of institutionalized racism and systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans. Then, she discusses America 's War on Drugs that disproportionately targets minorities and finally as she examines the hardship faced by felons she compares and contrasts Jim Crow Laws to mass incarceration. Alexander surmises that mass incarceration is designed to maintain white supremacy and sustain a racial classification system. Alexander 's book is relevant to my research paper because she provides evidence that the criminal justice system is rooted in racism and directly linked to the racist agenda of the white supremacist. Broussard, B. (2015).

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The New Jim Crow was a thought provoking documentary detailing the mass incarceration of black men in America. The author tells how these men, as prisoners, are treated of quasi-slaves. In fact, the prison system is now the new plantation system of slavery in America today. It was more shocking for to learn what type of low wages the prisoners earn; and how refusal to work could be grounds for disciplinary action such as isolation cells or extended time added to original sentence time.

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Introduction Many people are or have become ignorant to the fact that racism still exists. They see racism on the news, hear about racism on the radio and from their families and friends, yet still don’t accept the fact that African Americans are still being held back from prospering by our very own American government. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander elaborates on the still very existing discrimination of colored people, especially of African Americans. She proves to us that the idea of “slavery” is being kept alive but in a new way till this very day.

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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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The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is a non-fiction introduction in the novel “They say, I say” by Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russel Durst. The New Jim Crow is written to educate society on the discrimination and exclusion that African Americans are facing in the United States; the same discrimination and exclusion they faced when the Jim Crow laws took place. Michelle Alexander forms her evidence from her own experience fighting for the civil rights of others and she also uses people of colors experiences with losing their civil rights from being labeled a “felon” and she uses statistics to help her readers better visualize the extent of African American incarceration, these techniques provide the readers with accurate

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Through the years, the world has made substantial progress towards ensuring equal treatment under law for all citizens. However, the cycle continues, as disparities within the justice decision making process is growing at each level of the criminal justice system. Although the drug policies and sentencing guidelines that are put into place by our legislators are said to be “race neutral,” they have actually shown to be pervasively biased, affecting both innocent as well as guilty minority citizens. There is no question that the most important stage of the criminal justice system is the sentencing phase. It is at this stage where prosecutors, along with law enforcement personnel, attempt to determine who will or will not be granted leniency

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Andy Miller Professor Farber HIST 129: 18157 November 30th The New Jim Crow Era Following the period of Reconstruction, state and local governments passed laws in the southern United States which enforced racial segregation of Americans. These laws, known as Jim Crow Laws, mandated segregation in all public facilities within the former Confederate States which created a “separate but equal" status for black citizens. The old Jim Crow Laws continued to be enforced until 1964 when the Civil Rights Act outlawed all discrimination based on race. However, Michele Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, argues that through the mass imprisonment of African American in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have created a new era and system

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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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The New Jim Crow give me a new perspective to look at the racism in the United States. Before reading it, I knew that black people are being mistreated in the United States, but I don’t know that government uses its power to control that black people’s life. I thought the election of President Obama means the end of racism in the United States, and apparently I am wrong. By reading this book, I realized the segregation changed its form to appear in today’s society and this new form of segregation turn most people into colorblindness. We don’t see the segregation is happened in United States because we don’t experience what black people have experienced.

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Disparities in the Criminal Justice System (3) The criminal justice system in the U.S. targets and punishes African-Americans much more aggressively than white people. African-Americans constitute a smaller percentage of the population than whites but have a higher rate of arrested especially for drugs. African‐Americans make up around 12.5 % of the population in the US but account for about 40% of arrests, 50% of the prison population, and 50% of death row inmates. “African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites.”

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