In Michelle Alexander's 'The New Jim Crow And The House I Live In'

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

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