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The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander: Chapter Analysis

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Michelle Alexander is a freelance writer, public speaker, and a consultant with advocacy organizations committed to ending mass incarceration. Alexander wrote her NAACP Image Award winning book called The New Jim Crow in 2011. Her book describes in depth details about racial justice and mass incarceration for people of color. “How could the War on Drugs operate in the discriminatory manner…when hardly anyone advocates or engages in explicit race discrimination” (Alexander, 2011, p. 102). Alexander asks this question and answers it as a whole throughout chapter 3. This essay will analyze and evaluate Chapter 3, which is called The Color of Justice, explaining policies, Supreme Court rulings, and everyday practices. The chapter starts off by …show more content…

100). At the same time, however, police officers also target more Africa American communities due to high crime rates. Even though the crime rates in Black communities are not as high as it has been, those communities are still targeted. Mass incarceration, on the other hand, is not due to the fact of these crime rates. According to Alexander’s (2011) studies, “As of September 2009, only 7.9 percent of federal prisoners were convicted of violent crimes” (West & Sobol, 2010, p. 101). So the question is, what is causing mass incarceration if not crime …show more content…

Because of these rules that law enforcement officials have created, mass incarceration rates have sky rocketed. When the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education (1995) released their survey, the noticed that 95 percent of people described an African American person to be a typical drug user and only five percent of people described the typical drug consumer to be of another race. Nonetheless, the people in the 95 percent range showed cognitive bias as a result of only 15 percent of African Americans in 1995 were drug users. Where as, the majority of the White race consisted of drug users. Alexander responds by saying, “There is no reason to believe that the survey results would have been any different if police officers or prosecutors have been the respondents” (2011, p. 106). Alexander, in fact, shows great evidence here by comparing the racial drug survey to our law enforcement officials today. Since the majority of colored people are in our jails today, this evidence and research back up the fact that African Americans and Latinos are targeted by law

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The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is a book outlining and analysing the social constructs of the United States of America through the context of mechanics of the judicial system. It compares and contrasts the slavery, old Jim Crow law and post Jim Crow law eras in the means to highlight the racial discrimination against the Black and Brown community by the White elite. The author explores the court cases and legislation passed by the government to implement a national system geared to favor the White community and its effects on the imagery that has developed in the American mind set. Michelle Alexander is among many things an African-American woman. She is lawyer who represented in the Civil Rights era.

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African Americans are more likely to be searched than a Caucasia due to racial bias from Caucasian officers. To most officers, a Caucasian does not look as suspicious as an African American which makes them more susceptible to searches. Even if a Caucasian is searched and caught for having illegal drugs, the consequences are usually not as bad for them. In fact, in Chicago alone, “White drug offenders are rarely arrested” and when they are caught and brought to court “they are treated more favorably at every stage of the criminal justice process” (189). All across the nation, African Americans are filling up our county jails at a higher rate than any other race in the United States, which is better known as mass incarceration.

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Alexander argues that this is another discriminatory tactic that allows the criminal justice system to give African Americans harsher

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In Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: The Age of Colorblindness, she argues that the debate on the war on drugs unfairly targets those of color; typically young, black men. She states how many African Americans have been in prison due to drug convictions and now carry the title of a felon with them for life. Alexander recognizes that the war on drugs was a policy with an attempt to crack down on drugs in certain communities, however, she still believes these policies target minorities. She supports this with the “stop and frisk” policy, which grants the officers with the ability to search individuals on their own natural “suspicion.” It is most obvious that poor black men are more likely to be stopped over white individuals.

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Jaclyn Seigel Doctor Morales PHM2121 30 April 2015 “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” By Michelle Alexander; An Evaluation In “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness” by Michelle Alexander, Alexander explains her opinion on mass incarceration and “The War on Drugs.” Even though “The War on Drugs” took few steps forward to eliminating drug abuse, Michelle Alexander’s book explains how this has created more problems rather than solutions. Alexander focuses on how African American communities have become more vulnerable to the arrests.

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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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The author found that more people of color, especially black males are under the control our criminal justice system than were enslaved in 1850. The author supports the pervious idea by using specific examples such as the “War on Drugs” to show people of color are targeted more by law enforcement officers and scrutinize harsher by our courts for drug laws but the drug usage is used at the same rate by blacks and whites. With the help of mass-media, the “crack” epidemic in inner cities, the War on Drugs policies, the “Get tough on crime” policies, and the propaganda about people of color all have influenced the way mainstream society thinks about blacks. The author found that mainstream society believes that black people commits more crime and uses more drugs than white people, so therefore blacks deserved to incarcerated. However, Michelle Alexander disproves in “The New Jim Crow” that blacks commit more crimes than whites, the drug usage rates are the same between both races, propaganda has influenced the way mainstream society views blacks and that the “War on Drugs” and the “Get Tough on Crime” was policies targeted towards inner cities and people of color with the intent to enslave them in the criminal justice system by giving them felonies in which people of color are disenfranchise by society.

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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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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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For a nearly unanimous Court, chief justice William Rehnquist disputed, “The claimant must illustrate that the central prosecutorial policy had a prejudiced effect and that it was enthused by a discriminatory purpose”. In order to prove “motivated by a discriminatory purpose”. Armstrong had to show that likewise located individuals of a different race were not prosecuted. In other words, unless it can be exposed that prosecutors because of their skin color, any apparent racism is consider incidental. The Court did not address the assault on drug use as a veiled assail on low-income, inner-city youth of color because the Supreme Court viewed the Armstrong instance through the prism of individualism, social effects of the war on drugs proved irrelevant(8).

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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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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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A study conducted by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services undertaking claims of sentencing disparities studies the felony sentencing outcomes particularly in New York courts between the years 1990 and 1992. Astonishingly, the study concluded that approximately one-third of minorities sentenced to prison would have received a shorter sentence with the possibility of a non-incarcerative penalty if they had been treated similarly to their white counterparts. Consequently, other sentencing data is consistent with the results of this study’s findings. On a national scale, black males specifically, who were convicted of drug felonies in state courts 52 percent of the time, while white males typically receive prison sentencing approximately 34 percent of the time. In addition, these figures are not constrained to gender given the similar ratio among black and white women as well.

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Even in our criminal legal system, a man of color is 6 times as likely to be convicted, and a Hispanic is 2.3 times more likely. Black men account for more than 50% of the jail, and prison population. “1 in every 15 African American men and 1 in every 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated in comparison to 1 in every 106 white men. ”(Jamal Hagler 8 facts..).

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Through the process of how legislators have defined crime, who police have arrested, and how media has reported crime, the typical criminal has been identified as young, urban, poor, minorities. President Barack Obama feels the same way. In a interview with Vice, Obama described how he believes the system is biased in a way that African American youth are more likely to be suspended for school, arrested, charged, and prosecuted more aggressively, than white American youth. Reiman would agree, and would add that a reason for this is that African Americans are disproportionately poor, and the poor tend to be arrested by the criminal justice system more frequently than their contribution to the crime problem would warrant. Then the question arises on why African Americans remain in poverty.

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