Mass Incarceration Compared To The Jim Crow

Many people would not think that a racial caste system exists in the United States, especially after Barack Obama was elected as a president. However, having a few successful African Americans doesn’t necessarily mean racism is abolished. After the civil rights movement, the law segregating African Americans and whites was eradicated, but still people frequently overlook the fact that the criminal justice system in the United States needs to be reformed. During the last thirty years, United States’ incarceration rates have soared while other countries’ incarceration rates remained the same or decreased. Not only that, after the War on Drugs, the incarcerated population in the United States became racially disproportionate. Although the studies

The new Jim Crow is a term that Alexander presents, that the mass incarceration is comparable to the Jim Crow. After the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War, the states started to impose qualification for voting to prevent African Americans from participating in politics. Correspondingly, the separation of the races had begun to emerge as a backlash against the gains of African Americans. Every state in the South had laws that disenfranchised African Americans and discriminated against them from lending sanction to schools, housing and jobs; these laws were called the Jim

However, I see some weaknesses in her arguments. She is mainly focusing on two aspects of the mass incarceration: the unbalanced amount of certain races of prisoners, and deprivation of basic human rights after prisoners are released. From my opinion, both points in her arguments are supported thoroughly, since even though the sentence itself is lowered, it’s the record that matters. In my opinion, however, the emphasis she puts on the arguments make the others seem less important and almost to an extent that mass incarceration is an only issue in racism. She claims that young African American men are far more likely to serve time in prison than those in any other race because of the drug war. However, that kind of aspects happen in different situations as well. For example, the ratio of White and Asian students going to college are higher than that of African Americans and Hispanics. It is not some type of social control caused by the government to eliminate the chances of African Americans and Hispanic people receiving education. Rather, it’s caused by the racial disparities in wealth. There are relatively more black and Hispanic people who are experiencing economic privation than those of other races. And since they don’t receive proper