In every country, criminals are punished differently such that some are sentenced to prison, others the public becomes the judge and the jury while for the case of the United States we usually have a trial to prove that they are not guilty and if they are indeed guilty then they will be just sentenced them to jail. In the article “How to Dismantle the “New Jim Crow”? it states how the number of inmates have increased since the late 1960’s. In some cases, the prisons are filled with minority race within the community for example; the African American, Latinos, and many more that’s why they call it the new Jim Crow. With this kind of treatment of the minority, some people have different reasons as to why the minority race is the one that is mostly …show more content…
In the 60’s the population did not sentence people unless the crime was really intolerable for example rape, murder and grand theft, however in the 21st century people are incarcerated for the possession of drug such as marijuana although some states already legalized and it does not matter how much of it was found on the person if it is of large quantity or even in small quantity. I find this ridiculous for the reason being for those who are incarcerated it goes on their record such that if they apply for a job they will have to state that they have been in jail and this usually risks their chances of getting the job which means they will be unemployed and they will do whatever it takes to make ends meet. This usually means they will upgrade up their crime such as armed robbery or even selling cocaine and this brings us full circle of what is wrong with the justice system
In the end, we have to think about how the country looks if we have the highest number of prisoners than other nations. This could be seen as a government that spends too much time cracking down on minor offenses instead of focusing on the bigger crimes such as terrorism or even internet crimes. So, if we do actually focus on improving the society by providing people with jobs then we will not need prisons since the majority of people would have what they
Did you know that White Americans have a higher chance to be frisked than to be shot? That is the opposite for African Americans. They have a higher chance of being shot before being frisked. But to push this farther, cops are trained on reaction. If you quickly put your hand in your pocket and you don’t do as told, police may think you have a dangerous item in your pocket, so you end up wounded or tazered.
No matter what they have done, small to large crimes, they are labeled as criminals and prisoners and seeing nothing more than that causing a permanent a second-class citizenship. Once release out of prison, former prisoners enter a world that is invisible to others where discrimination and permanent social exclusion is legalized. In addition, police brutality also constitutes the New Jim Crow where police officers racially profile African Americans civilians usually ending in violence and death. With police brutality happening over the U.S. it places a fear amongst communities fearing the authorities. The old Jim Crow was not stated in the constitution however they knew of this existence because due to the fact that African Americans were openly segregated in stores, schools, and many other public places.
According to Alexander, “Today, most American know and don’t know the truth about mass incarceration” (p. 182). Before reading this book I did know of the inequality towards people of color in the criminal justice. book has made me realized how easily we as humans, jump into conclusion without thinking twice and judging a person by their look or race without trying to get who they are. Although most people know better and know how wrong it is to judge a book or person on their cover we often find ourselves doing just that when we first come into contact with a different culture. This book “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander has made me realized how the United State has one of the largest population in prison.
I attended a high school that is predominately of color, however, I don't remember a time when a teacher taught the students about systemic racism. So, I decided to take the matter into my own hands – I pressured my history teacher to talk about the issues that currently affect people of color. I recommended a book called "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander to be taught the last few weeks of school. Surprisingly, the teacher agreed to add the book to the curriculum. We talked about systemic racism, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the prison industrial complex.
In Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, she analyzes the use of the War on Drugs to not truly be against crack, but those of a minority; as well as considering the shift of using race to describe and discriminate in the Criminal Justice System, and in society. On top of the switch of who is able to define someone as colored, the Criminal Justice System is in a sense, the new Jim Crowe, seeing that the system affects those in the minority groups more than those who are not. It used to be that the everyday person could describe a person by their race or skin tone, which would then group minorities by their described race. Grouping these people made discrimination stronger, especially when history of how these people were treated is
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.
The Prison Reform Movement was triggered by George Zimmerman not found guilty, which led to public outrage. The minorities make up most of the prisons. “According to the Sentencing Project, which promotes sentencing reform and alternatives to incarceration, the likelihood that a white man will spend time in prison in his lifetime is one in seventeen; for Latino men, the likelihood is one in six, and for black men, it is one in three”(When we fight we win 56). People do not know that the prison system is a way to keep minorities locked away. They do not know that a black or latino person are most likely to be in prison than a white person.
Minorities such as blacks and Hispanics are more like to be charged with more serious crimes than whites(Peck). The reason being is because minorities may have more stains such as poverty, discrimination, and criminal victimization. These strains can leave a damper on the growth of one group of people when there is various amount of strains to keep a group from progressing. Often as a young minority, juveniles are taught by their environment or parents on how to survive in America. Which is not always positive and due to stereotypes set by society, it can become easier for a minority to be mistaken as a criminal and soon follow in the footsteps of a
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.
Does it make sense to lock up 2.4 million people on any given day, giving the U.S the highest incarceration rate in the world. More people are going to jail, this implies that people are taken to prison everyday for many facilities and many go for no reason. People go to jail and get treated the worst way as possible. This is a reason why the prison system needs to be changed. Inmates need to be treated better.
Even before our nation’s founding, people of color have been discriminated. Decades pass and the criminal justice system is still “racist” labeling people of color as criminal, meaning black equal criminals therefore is fine to discriminate people of color just because they’re criminals. In “The New Jim Crow” the system targets black men because they are associated with crime, meaning crime stands in for race. In the other hand, As Heather Mac Donald writes in her book “The War on Cops”, “The criminal-justice system does treat individual suspects and criminals equally, they concede. But the problem is how society defines crime and criminals” (154).
There’s a multitude of things that need to be repaired in our system, and prison is one of them. Prison reform is an important issue because we need to take care of everyone and with the way we treat criminals, we do not see them as equal. We need to assess illegal acts correctly instead of trying to put people in jail for the rest of their lives. We also need to work more on how we try to rehabilitate people. Instead of barring convicts off from the rest of us, we need to teach them how to integrate, so they can live better lives than they did
The government takes these precautions because it's for the benefit of keeping what has been established for years to come. The criminal justice system has influential leaders with the power to change current systems, but are not willing to step out and make an imprint of change against unfairness (Lockup Nation; American Prisons). Officials who are behind the laws and regulations regarding criminal sentences have hard decisions when trying to impose a new process of handling crimes, which potentially could backfire. Leaders that worked in law enforcement for years upon years are set into a notion of how justice will be served because of history with training and social norm of persecuting crimes. The uproot of change of sentencing crimes would affect those in higher authority.
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.
isn’t the only thing people believe needs to change; the reasons for arrests have been criticized by many. America incarcerates more citizens for drug related crimes than any other place in the world. Of the roughly 200,000 in federal prison, 52% are being held for drug crimes and only 8% are for violent crimes, such as: murder, assault, and robbery (Waldman, 2013). Many believe that the “War on Drugs” must become less aggressive because of its large contribution to the prison population. The distribution of prisoners by race has also raised concern among Americans.