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The rise of america's prison empire
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The rise of america's prison empire
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A woman in West Oakland, California steps outside her rundown apartment door. She slowly looks up and down the street, seeing only children and women like herself- alone on their doorsteps. Still single at 42, she 's asked herself many times where have all the good men have gone. Are there any black men left in her community that aren 't dealing or buying drugs? Men who will be thrown into prison for either offence, thrown right back out, and who are eventually stuck in the same, continuous cycle. This woman 's question (where are all the black men?) is one that The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and The House I Live In by Eugene Jarecki, seek to answer.
Michelle Alexander, an associate professor at Ohio State University, provides a strong explanation for the apparent absence of black men, and the structural oppression within the incarceration system that has caused it.Within her book, The New Jim Crow, Alexander recounts the Sunday morning when Barack Obama, then just a presidential candidate, stepped up to the podium in Chicago and directed a condemning speech to his fellow black fathers. He declared that
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With no job prospects and impending (often immediate) homelessness, what choice does a convicted criminal have but to return to the crime which they committed? Drugs, although legal, provide an income and a way for them to sustain themselves. Throughout the course of The House We Live In, viewers see young black youth with no job prospects within their poor communities turn to drugs and drug distribution. Once they return from prison, they 're forced right back into the same
From the study, Michelle Alexander’s argument is true and correct that the mass incarcerations are just a representation of Jim Crow. The Jim Crow has just been redesigned as the blacks have continued to be mistreated and denied some of the rights and privileges that their counterparts enjoy. There is discernment against the African Americans towards different privileges which are essential to their lives. This discrimination is political as leaders steer operations that are aimed at racially discriminating people from particular groups of race.
In the following paragraphs I am going to show how Hollywood portrays the Salem Witch Trails and the 1690’s compared with what actual happened in history and that in the film "The Crucible".
The play described Betty as a young girl, nine years of age, who began showing symptoms around the same time as her cousin Abigail Williams. Betty accused many people, and testified against them in multiple court cases. From the evidence that the Witch Trials shows, Betty was most likely pretending to be possessed in order to gain attention, or rebel from the strict lifestyle the Puritans followed. “She could not concentrate at prayer time and barked like a dog when her father would rebuke her. She screamed wildly when she heard the ‘Our Father’ prayer and once hurled a Bible across the room” (Walsh).
In 1860-1960 there was lynching in the United States. When the confederates (south) lost the civil war the slaves got freedom and got rights of human beings. This was just to say because segregation wasn 't over in the South and didn 't go away for over 100 years. Any black person in the South accused but not convicted of any crime of looking at a white woman, whistling at a white woman, touching a white woman, talking back to a white person, refusing to step into the gutter when a white person passed on the sidewalk, or in some way upsetting the local people was liable to be dragged from their house or jail cell by lots of people crowds, mutilated in a terrible
Alexander attempts to show by means of cultural and historical review, political decisions, enactment of legislation and statistical evidence from the time of the old Jim Crow laws, the retarded advancement of civil rights of young black men, and their mass incarceration. This occurrence produces a false reality and perpetuates the history of racial discrimination that exists today in America through a "caste system" by legal framework that disguising itself as the "War on Drugs." The practice of mass incarceration labels and demonizes those persons to the point that they lose their rights to vote, limits employment, are denied housing and educatio...
Salem Witch Craft In 1962 the penalty for witchcraft was to be hung or smashed. There was a big outburst of witchcraft and spells that were going around among the people of Massachusetts in 1962. Some of the women of Salem began the witchcraft, many people started to catch on and follow them. A lot of these people were hung up to what the Bible said about the wrongs of witchcraft.
In her article “From America’s New Working Class”, Kathleen R. Arnold makes clear that welfare/workfare recipients are treated like prisoners or second class citizens. Likewise, In Michelle Alexander’s article “The New Jim Crow” she describes how blacks is made criminals by a corrupt criminal justice system. Alexander also points out in her article “The New Jim Crow” that shackles and chains are not the only form of slavery. Furthermore, Alexander states that although America is thought of as the home of the free, blacks are more likely than any other race to be arrested, unemployed, or denied housing. Freedom is not an absolute value in America, as slavery is more ubiquitous than ever.
“The New Jim Crow” is an article by Michelle Alexander, published by the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law. Michelle is a professor at the Ohio State Moritz college of criminal law as well as a civil rights advocate. Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law is part of the world’s top education system, is accredited by the American Bar Association, and is a long-time member of the American Law association. The goal of “The New Jim Crow” is to inform the public about the issues of race in our country, especially our legal system. The article is written in plain English, so the common person can fully understand it, but it also remains very professional. Throughout the article, Alexander provides factual information about racial issues in our country. She relates them back to the Jim Crow era and explains how the large social problem affects individual lives of people of color all over the country. By doing this, Alexander appeals to the reader’s ethos, logos, and pathos, forming a persuasive essay that shifts the understanding and opinions of all readers.
In a perfect world, we would not have racial tensions and we would all sing Kumbaya together, however, we do not live inside a perfect world. Racial injustice that relates to incarceration in the United States, specifically to those who are African-Americans, is a literal fabrication of our imperfect world and details the thinly veiled allegory of our social apartheid. According to author Glenn Loury, this aspect of our nation’s prison system is the most damaging to our African-American community, wherein said group are being racially profiled and “trapped in the dark vestiges of the ghetto” (Loury, 2008, 57). In his ethnography, Race, Incarceration, and American Values, Loury highlights these troubling trends concerning the dehumanization of African-Americans through our current sociopolitical landscape.
Although young black males are emerging as part of the lowest caste in the growing racial caste system in the United States, there has not been any significant wide movement to end mass incarceration. Therefore, as this novel argues that mass incarceration is metaphorically the new Jim Crow, she reaches out towards the individuals who desire to stop racial injustice from continuing. She argues that no meaningful reform, in regards to mass incarceration, can be achieved without a major social movement. Therefore, she desires to make the public aware of the current caste system that is in place, so that the current caste system can be overturned. Utilizing her knowledge and background as a civil rights lawyer, she provides readers with statistics and facts that illustrate that there is a new Jim Crow in society. Moreover, she highlights the importance of impeding another racial caste system from being formed in the
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a book by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. The book discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States. Michelle Alexander (2010) argues that despite the old Jim Crow is death, does not necessarily means the end of racial caste (p.21). In her book “The New Jim Crow”, Alexander describes a set of practices and social discourses that serve to maintain African American people controlled by institutions. In this book her analyses is centered in examining the mass incarceration phenomenon in recent years. Comparing Jim Crow with mass incarceration she points out that mass incarceration is a network of laws, policies, customs and institutions that works together –almost invisible– to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined by race, African American (p. 178 -190).
In this narrative essay, Brent Staples provides a personal account of his experiences as a black man in modern society. “Black Men and Public Space” acts as a journey for the readers to follow as Staples discovers the many societal biases against him, simply because of his skin color. The essay begins when Staples was twenty-two years old, walking the streets of Chicago late in the evening, and a woman responds to his presence with fear. Being a larger black man, he learned that he would be stereotyped by others around him as a “mugger, rapist, or worse” (135).
Staples, Brent. “Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space.” 50 Essays. Ed. Samuel Cohen.
“She thinks to dance with me on my wife’s grave! And well she might, for I thought of her softly. God help me, I lusted, and there is a promise in such sweat. But it is a whore’s vengeance, and you must see it, I set myself entirely in your hands.” John Proctor says this to Danforth in the movie “The Crucible,” which is a fascinating, and disturbing story based on an important event in history. This event was the Salem Witch Trials. The author Arthur Miller wrote this story in response to the major event the McCarthy Era. The Crucible showed the similarities between the McCarthy Era and the Salem Witch Trials.
“Miller tries both to offer a disclaimer about the imaginative aspects of his work, and to claim a higher level of veracity for the play’s authority.” (133)