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The New Jim Crow Essay On Legalized Discrimination

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Legalized Discrimination is Contributing to Mass Incarceration
Mass incarceration has been an issue for decades, with no clear solution in sight. One major turning point in the development of mass incarceration, based on reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, is the idea of legalized discrimination. Alexander said, “What is painfully obvious when one steps back from individual cases and specific policies is that the system of mass incarceration operated with stunning efficiency to sweep people of color off the streets, lock them in cages, and then release them into an inferior second-class status” (pg. 100). This idea of legalized discrimination allows police officers to intentionally target black individuals because of prejudices …show more content…

The first phase is roundup. During this phase, vast numbers of individuals are swept into the criminal justice system by the police, by conducting drug operations primarily in poor communities of color. As long as they are given “consent,” the police are able to stop, interrogate, and search anyone they want for a drug investigation. There are no checks to make sure police officers are not using their discretion in a discriminatory manner; therefore, racial biases are granted free reign. Because the police are allowed to use race as a factor when selecting whom to stop and search, it is guaranteed that those who are swept into the system are primarily black and brown (Alexander, pg. 180). The second phase is formal control. The beginning of this phase is indicated by conviction. Once an individual is arrested, they are generally denied meaningful legal representation and are pressured to plead guilty whether they are or not. While these individuals are under formal control, virtually every aspect of their life is regulated and monitored by the system and any form of resistance or disobedience is subject to punishment. This control can last a lifetime, even for those convicted of extremely minor, nonviolent offenses; however, most of those swept into the system are eventually released. Once …show more content…

United States case, Whren argued that granting police officers with such a broad discretion to investigate anyone for drug crimes created a high risk of police exercising their discretion in a racially discriminatory manner. There is no requirement that any evidence of drug activity actually be present before launching a drug investigation. Because there is no requirement of evidence, police officers make judgements based on who seems like a drug criminal and influenced by racial stereotypes and bias. Whren also argued that failing to prohibit the police from stopping individuals for drug investigations unless there was an actual reason to believe the individual was committing, or had committed, a drug crime was unreasonable under the Fourteenth Amendment, and would expose black individuals to a high risk of discriminatory stops and searches. In response, the Court rejected their claim and ruled that claims of racial bias could not be brought under the Fourteenth Amendment. This made it impossible to challenge racial bias in the criminal justice system under the Fourteenth Amendment and has barred litigation of these claims under federal civil rights laws as well (Alexander, pg.

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They began by introducing Berlin Boyd’s case and defining it as a vote that “pushed the need to do something different to aid African Americans in Memphis, to level economic disparities, and help keep them out of the criminal-justice-system quagmire” (Sells and Watts 276). The authors explain that when officers catch someone with marijuana, it is up to their discretion. They are allowed two choices: to issue a $50 fine or current state charge ($2,500 fine). By providing that comparison, it is evident to the reader that that is an unjust way to charge those with marijuana. The authors then show the statistics of the people who get arrested in previous years and state that “The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says blacks in the Memphis area are 4.2 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession as a white person, though the two groups use marijuana at comparable rates” (277).

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In the book, The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, readers are given a look at the long and extensive history of racism towards African-Americans. From there, the reader is shown how racism towards African-Americans has not gone away and is still very much common in modern society. Throughout the novel, Alexander argues and discusses how African-Americans are being discriminated against in the form of mass incarceration. “Mass incarceration refers not only to the criminal justice system but also to the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison” (Alexander 14). The War On Drugs can largely be put to blame for the increase in incarcerations.

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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.

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Alexander argues that the system perpetuates a form of racial control akin to the Jim Crow laws of the past, primarily through the mass incarceration of Black men. She examines how policies such as the War on Drugs disproportionately target and incarcerate Black communities, creating a cycle of poverty and disenfranchisement. Through

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If, as Alexander suggests, the prison system will always be racist and designed to harm people of color, the end goal for repairing these injustices must be the abolition of prison — even a reformed version of prison would have the same racism at its core. Alexander’s account of the Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs serves as chilling evidence to support the claim that the carceral system is inherently racist. Incontrovertibly, White resentment toward Black Americans did not dissipate after Jim Crow. Identifying the (obvious) vitriol that remained among White as an effective way to motivate a voting Bloc, Presidential candidates such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan began campaigning for a so-called War on Drugs. Outwardly, this surge in rhetoric about drug crime was a call to protect people in cities from the dangers of drugs.

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The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is an eye opening book, drawing parallels between modern day America and some of the darkest times in American history. There are underlying themes that highlight and give evidence towards issues, throughout this entire book, that many Americans are unaware of are Institutionalized Racism, War on Drugs, and the Mass Incarceration of American minorities. Certain sections of this book really stood out to me and fascinated me. How could this be happening under so many people’s noses without being brought up?

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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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For this semester, we read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. The book talks about how minorities face, especially black men, being treated like second-class citizens by the criminal justice system and this leading to our modern mass incarceration problem. Alexander goes as far as to say “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it” (2). This is shown by the War on Drugs.

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Pretext stops are often used by officers as a manipulation tactic to get drivers to consent to drug searches. They will use “minor traffic violations as an excuse—a pretext—to search for drugs, even though there is not a shred of evidence suggesting the motorist is violating drug laws” (Alexander). If a person is stopped by the police on a pretext, once that person “consents” to the search, they lose all of their power and the police now have free rein to search that vehicle. By doing this, it makes it a lot easier for police officers to arrest more

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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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“Once

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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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Alexander notes that justice system has respect for the wisdom of police judgment, which often results in their arrests not being questioned. Through the tactic of consent searches, police officers are given the ammunition to make their arrests. They use traffic violations and drug sniffing dogs in order to search people and their property for drugs. The tactic of stop and frisk is also often employed, and is deemed acceptable if the officer has “probable cause” to stop the individual in the first place. Alexander points out that these tactics are mostly employed in poor, urban areas, because making an arrest is much easier since blacks tend to sell drugs more out in the

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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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In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in The Era of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, she begins by points out the underlying problem in our Criminal Justice system. The problem being prioritizing the control of those in this racial caste rather than focusing on reasonable punishment and efforts to deter crime. Alexander begins by speaking of her experience as a civil rights lawyer and what soon became her priority after seeing a poster that mentioned how the war on drugs is the new jim crow when it comes to the application and outcome of it. As Alexander points out the correlation between the war on drugs and it being the new jim crow, she discusses the mass incarceration that is prevalent in our society and the number of African American

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