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Mass incarceration the essay
Mass incarceration the essay
The new jim crow by michelle alexander in they say i say pages 266-285
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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.
To begin, Alexander points out how felons are depicted as life-long prisoners in her article ”The New Jim Crow”. However, Alexander states that The War on Drugs caused many blacks to be put in prison and scrutinized by the government thereafter. Similarly, according to Arnold, welfare/workfare recipients are under constant supervision and are required to work menial jobs. In addition, Arnold mentio...
Michelle Alexander in her book "The New Jim Crow" argues that Mass Incarceration is similar to Jim Crow; Alexander believes that caste systems such as Jim Crow and slavery are similar to the existing system of mass incarceration. In addition, Alexander accuses the U.S. criminal justice system, implying their laws undividedly target African Americans through the War on Drugs and racial limitation. In comparing mass incarceration with Jim Crow, Alexander points to compelling parallels regarding political disenfranchisement, legalized discrimination, and symbolic production of a race. Alexander, moreover, effectively offers a rebuttal to the counterargument that the New Jim Crow does not carry the same level of racial hostility as the Old Jim
The Author transitions the past and present signatures of Jim Crow and the New Jim Crow with the suggestion that the New Jim Crow, by mass incarceration and racism as a whole, marginalizes and relegates Blacks to residential, educational and constitutionally endowed service to the Country. The final chapter of The New Jim Crow reviews the manner in which the Black community might respond to the racism that exists today. Some research implies that we in America have reached a point of attrition as to incarceration, and the positive effects outweigh the negative effects of marginalization and collateral damage to the community. By some research, the "War on Drugs" procreates poverty, joblessness, family breakdown, and crime.
“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.
For more than two hundred years, a certain group of people lived in misery; conditions so inhumane that the only simile that can compare to such, would be the image of a caged animal dying to live, yet whose live is perished by the awful chains that dragged him back into a dark world of torture and misfortune. Yes, I am referring to African Americans, whose beautiful heritage, one which is full of cultural beauty and extraordinary people, was stained by the privilege given to white men at one point in the history of the United States. Though slavery has been “abolished” for quite some years; or perhaps it is the ideal driven to us by our modern society and the lines that make up our constitution, there is a new kind of slavery. One which in
Though slavery was arguably abolished, “for thousands of blacks, the badge of slavery [lives] on” (Alexander 141). Many young black men today face similar discrimination as a black man in the Jim Crow era - in housing, employment, public benefits, and so-called constitutional rights. This discrimination characterizes itself on a basis of a person’s criminal record, making it perfectly legal. As Alexander suggests, “This is the new normal, the new racial equilibrium” (Alexander, 181).
Prior to World War I there was much social, economic, and political inequality for African Americans. This made it difficult for African Americans to accept their own ethnicity and integrate with the rest of American society. By the end of World War II however African Americans had made great strides towards reaching complete equality, developing their culture, securing basic rights, and incorporating into American society.
In todays society the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. This high incarceration rate is due to the growing phenomena known as mass incarceration. This phenomenon has led to massive increase of people being placed in prison and the amount of money being used for these prisons. The book, Race to Incarcerate by Marc Mauer, focuses on mass incarceration as our default social policy because of the weak welfare state in the U.S. In the book Mauer discusses the causes and the problems with this policy.
The United States developed the official poverty measures in 1960. It was developed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had declared a war on poverty during the Civil Rights era. (The Path of Power- The years of Lyndon B. Johnson, (Caro, 16). The poverty rate of African Americans has been declining for many years. The Census Bureau releases two reports every year that describe who is poor in the United States based on cash resources. There is also the supplemental poverty measure (SPM) which takes account for the cash resources and non cash benefits from government programs aimed at low income families. (www.Census.gov/People and household). In 2012 there were over 46.5 million people in poverty and of those numbers 10 million were African American according to the poverty reports. African Americans have been a major factor since slavery. Since the late 1660s there has been a race on poverty since the marches of the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King. One of the protests was the call to March on Washington in 1963. Dr. King stated that “on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity”. (MLK speech, March on Washington, 1963)
In the United States, the rate of incarceration has increased shockingly over the past few years. In 2008, it was said that one in 100 U.S. adults were behind bars, meaning more than 2.3 million people. Even more surprising than this high rate is the fact that African Americans have been disproportionately incarcerated, especially low-income and lowly educated blacks. This is racialized mass incarceration. There are a few reasons why racialized mass incarceration occurs and how it negatively affects poor black communities.
The New Jim Crow is the direct consequences of War on Drug. That aimed at reducing, preventing and eradicate drug usage in America through punitive means. The effect of the war on drug policies returned de jure discrimination, denied African Americans justice and undermined the rule of law by altering the criminal justice system in ways that deprive African Americans civil rights and citizenship. In the “New Jim Crow” Alexandra argues that the effects of the drug war policies are not unattended consequences but coordinated by designed to deny African Americans opportunity to gain wealth, excluded from gaining employment and exercise civil right through mass incarceration and felony conviction.
Wacquant argues “Confinement is the other technique through which the nagging problem of persistent marginally rooted in unemployment, subemployment, and the precarious work is made to shrink on —if not disappear from — the public scene” (60). By forcing people to work unreliable jobs, America is also forcing people into prison. He also states “The vast majority of the occupants of county jails do come from the ranks of the “working poor,” that fraction of the working class that does not manage to escape poverty although they work, but who are largely ineligible for social protections because they work at poverty-level jobs” (70). This endless circle of unjust treatment of the poor has dire consequences. People released from prison are kept of heavy surveillance and are unable to grab hold of a job because employers will not hire ex-convicts. They also lose all ability to receive any further pubic assistance. In response, their children are led down the same path of little to no education, which leads to unstable working conditions, which leads to
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).
When one thinks of slavery, they may consider chains holding captives, beaten into submission, and forced to work indefinitely for no money. The other thing that often comes to mind? Stereotypical African slaves, shipped to America in the seventeenth century. The kind of slavery that was outlawed by the 18th amendment, nearly a century and a half ago. As author of Modern Slavery: The Secret World of 27 Million People, Kevin Bales, states, the stereotypes surrounding slavery often confuse and blur the reality of slavery. Although slavery surely consists of physical chains, beatings, and forced labor, there is much more depth to the issue, making slavery much more complex today than ever before.
According to the Oxford Index, “whether called mass incarceration, mass imprisonment, the prison boom, or hyper incarceration, this phenomenon refers to the current American experiment in incarceration, which is defined by comparatively and historically extreme rates of imprisonment and by the concentration of imprisonment among young, African American men living in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage.” It should be noted that there is much ambiguity in the scholarly definition of the newly controversial social welfare issue as well as a specific determination in regards to the causes and consequences to American society. While some pro arguments cry act as a crime prevention technique, especially in the scope of the “war on drugs’.
Social Stratification in the African American community has changed over the years. Social stratification is defined as a rigid subdivision of a society into a hierarchy of layers, differentiated on the basis of power, prestige, and wealth according to Webster’s dictionary. David Newman in Sociology Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life describes stratification as a ranking system for groups of people that perpetuates unequal rewards and life chances in society. From slavery to the present, the African American community has been seen to have lower status compared to white people. Today, the stratification or hierarchy difference between whites and black are not really noticeable, but it is still present. However, during slavery, the difference in social stratification was noticeable. Whites dominated over the blacks and mulattoes (offspring of a white and black parent). The mulattoes were seen to have a higher stratification than an offspring of black ancestry. Because the mulattoes were related to the whites, they were able to obtain higher education and better occupations than blacks. For example, most slaves of a lighter skin tone worked in the houses and darker slaves worked in the fields. As the people of light skin tone had children, they were able to have advantages too. The advantages have led into the society of today. In this paper I will discuss how stratification has been affected in the African American community over time by skin tone to make mulattoes more privileged than dark skin blacks.