ipl-logo

Mass Incarceration In The Criminal Justice System

586 Words3 Pages

Slavery, Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the carceral apparatus are all structural institutions that share a mutual beneficial relationship where each has supplemented and historically progressed into more advanced subtle forms of oppression and racism. Past and current regimes served as social functions with the objective of encompassing African Americans in a permanent subordinate position. In each generation, newer developments of a racial caste emerge with the same objective of repudiating African Americans citizenship. The only thing that has changed since Jim Crow is the language we use to justify racial exclusion (Alexander, 2). These four regimes are genealogically linked because they all advanced and developed from one another. As the generations progress, newer forms of social control, racial exclusion and oppressions develop. All of these regimes function as a racial caste system that locks a stigmatized racial group in …show more content…

It is, as Alexander explains, “a gateway into a larger system of racial stigmatization and permanent marginalization” (Alexander, 12). Mass incarceration is a larger system in which functions like Jim Crow laws that mesh people of color into a second class citizenship. Mass incarceration isn 't a term only applicable to the criminal justice system, but like past regimes, enables former prisoners, mainly people of color to be subject to “legalized discrimination and permanent social exclusion” (Alexander, 14). For example Operation Pipeline is an example of legalized discrimination that is a federally run general search program that targets people without cause for suspicion, mainly being people of color (Alexander, 71). This gives officers the consent to target and suspect people of color more than White individuals, even though they are just as likely to commit a drug offense or

Show More
Related

  • The Segregation In C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career Of Jim Crow

    536 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Strange Career of Jim Crow, published in 1955 by C. Vann Woodward, actually helped to shaped a part of U.S history. It was around the same time when the Civil Rights Movement was happening in the United States and right after the Supreme Court ’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education; this book was published to expose a clear and illuminating analysis of the history of the Jim Crow Laws. The south had choices to make regarding race, and the establishment; Jim Crow was not a person but was affiliate to represent the system of government and segregation in the United States. Named after the ‘racial caste system,’ Jim Crow affected millions of americans. Woodward analyzes the impact on the segregation between the North and the South by defining an argument, “Racism was originated in the North.”

    Read More

  • Chapter Six And Nine Of Annotations By Professor Bazian

    466 Words  | 2 Pages

    Professor Bazian analyzes how racism is embedded in our government. There is an entrenched resistance to integration and desecration within a large percent of the white population, especially that of the South. After the Civil War, a majority of the population refused to grant equal rights and found that through Jim Crow laws, the African American population would be detached from the general population. Because of this segregation, African Americans have seen it “transform into a structural and constant process of under-development coupled with heavy doses of violence…” (Bazian 44).

    Read More

  • Rhetorical Analysis Of A More Perfect Union By Cesar Chavez

    1633 Words  | 7 Pages

    Throughout his essay, Barack Obama carefully chooses his terminology, phrases such as “Jim Crow, “Racial”, Inferior” and “Equal citizenship”, elicit humaneness through snapshots of the vocabulary used. Furthermore, the imagery that is provoked with idiom such as slave or slavery is still mournful today. In Paragraph 30, it states that, “Legalized discrimination.. Meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of

    Read More

  • Theme Of Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness By Michelle Alexander

    2532 Words  | 11 Pages

    In the first chapter, “The Rebirth of Caste,” Alexander details the rise and fall of slavery and Jim Crow laws, as well as the emergence of its replacement: mass incarceration. In the era of chattel slavery in the emerging United States, the term “race” was born. By creating this social construct and deeming Africans as a lesser race and using pseudoscientific practices to falsely prove their inferiority, whites in America not only

    Read More

  • Summary Of Are Prisons Obsolete

    793 Words  | 4 Pages

    “The punishments associated with slavery became further incorporated into the penal system” (Davis 31), which is reflected in the disproportionate rate of Blacks incarcerated. Although Davis primarily focuses on Black people, there are “other racialized histories that have affected the development of the U.S. punishment system as well--the histories of Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian-Americans” (25). Because of the war on drugs, three-strikes law, the zero-tolerance laws in schools, and other racialized laws, Black people are being arrested and funneled through the system at higher rates than any other race. The reason could be because they suffer “pervasive discrimination, disproportionate poverty, homelessness, participation in street economies, and bias and abuse by law enforcement officers a (quote),” which leads to the higher rates of incarceration. This affects transgender people of color, specifically transgender women, because they are “targeted by police harassment and violence and, consequently, often come to distrust law enforcement” (quote).

    Read More

  • Racial Caste System In The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander

    652 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the article, The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, she explores a subject that most people ignore; that is a racial caste system exists in America. Specifically, she asserts that mass incarceration is a new racial caste system which provides context for the political, social and economic problems, represents the New Jim Crow. In post Jim Crow society, Alexander empathizes, we have adopted to the colorblind perspective, which states that race is not being justified for discrimination or social contempt. Instead of relying on race, we use our criminal justice system to label colored people as criminals. Once we labeled them as criminals, all forms of discrimination will be legal against people of color.

    Read More

  • The Never Ending Racism: The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander

    600 Words  | 3 Pages

    The New Jim Crow, Mass incarceration, is the rebirth of the caste system in the United States. People of color, blacks in particular, are being disproportional discriminated through the criminal justice system. The Criminal Justice System is being Mass incarceration creates a cycle that never ends for people that are locked up. This cycle perpetuates racial hierarchy because most of the people are black men and being in prison ruins their

    Read More

  • Incarceration In The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander

    718 Words  | 3 Pages

    Alexander then argues that mass incarceration is the new norm precisely resembles the racist system: Jim Crow because black males in the current society are equally as trapped as black individuals during the Jim Crow era. Black males are therefore trapped in the mass incarceration system, “competing on an unequal level towards success,” in order to keep white males on the top of our society. Alexander creates connections between the two caste systems and describing it as a “symbolic production of race,” the most important parallel. She argues that the production of race was created to stereotype black men as criminals and makes society believe so by generating propaganda, giving the government an excuse to criminalize black men more than white men, although they’re more likely to professionally sell drugs and not get criminalized for it, and making society support mass incarceration (p.

    Read More

  • Systemic Racism In America

    908 Words  | 4 Pages

    However, what they fail to see is that it’s a social fabrication. In America, there’s a singularity where some individuals have advantages because of their skin color, while unfortunately others are victimized for the equivalent reason. The deep-rooted controversy of inequality and prejudice has insinuated the social fabric in our American society and government, as African Americans still experience discrimination on all levels until today, but society seems to be blind to that fact. As mentioned in the article “Redesigning Racial Caste in America via Mass Incarceration” written by Gilda Graff, “The extent of America’s continuing blindness to the New Jim Crow can be seen in the presidential nominee Obama’s 2008 Father’s Day address about missing black fathers, a message delivered many times by black ministers as well as by Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier, and Louis Farrakhan” (126). As an example Kimberly Houzah, a twenty-seven-year-old woman was kicked out of a Victoria Secret store at the Quintard Mall in Oxford, Alabama.

    Read More

  • African American Ethnography Analysis

    1436 Words  | 6 Pages

    An African-American ethnography helps reveal African Americans’ cultural framework and values that guide their behaviors in a multitude of social contexts. A few noteworthy principles include the importance of family structures and education, the notion that limited resources result in missed opportunities and the idea that African-Americans are undervalued and not respected in society (Kennedy et. al., 2007). In America and European countries, Africans are always oppressed and experience tremendous counts of inequality. Inequality as defined in lecture is “a difference that is meaningful and results in or produces hierarchical power relations,” which renders African Americans unable to oppress non-Black people in the same sense that they are

    Read More

  • Inequality In Mass Incarceration

    61 Words  | 1 Pages

    I am interested in mass incarceration due to the fact the USA is a leading county of mass imprisonment. In my opinion, the most important social fact of mass imprisonment is the inequality in penal confinement. This inequality produces tremendous social problem in the USA with extraordinary mass imprisonment rates among racial minorities with no more than a high school education.

    Read More

  • Prison Incarceration In America

    912 Words  | 4 Pages

    In America currently there are about 2.3 million people that are incarcerated. The U.S. accounts for only 5 percent of the entire world’s population yet it holds around 25 percent of those people as the world’s prisoners. That is an astonishing number. Crime rates have grown over the years and don’t seem to be slowing down very much. This alone is a big cause to the debt in America as money gets poured into these prisons in order to maintain them; it is a nightmare.

    Read More

  • Incarceration In The Criminal Justice System

    222 Words  | 1 Pages

    Being involved in the criminal justice system conveys a negative social status. In these communities, even though the experience of incarceration is widespread, it is still stigmatizing, and incarceration is not discussed openly. Residents noted that the label “offender” becomes a master status and affects the lives of ex-offenders in many ways. For instance, ex-offenders find it difficult to get good jobs and housing.

    Read More

  • Why Mass Incarceration Policies Must Change

    448 Words  | 2 Pages

    1: Drug addiction, reasons are increasing day by day. 2: However, government are trying to reduce, but it is helpless and a lot of reasons behind this poverty, poor, education, and unemployment. 3: And this drug incarceration policy should be change. 1: Prison is not giving proper guidance 2: Rehabilitation 3: Unemployment rate 1:

    Read More

  • Penal System In The Prison System

    1084 Words  | 5 Pages

    (A) Pedagogical Systems which strictly demand that in exchange for implantations within its student bodies and aptitudes that conduce to proliferative (production) that they exhibit a generalized docility and obedience. In my first reading of Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punishment, I looked at the penal system specifically the prison system as the beginning of the development of the disciplinary society. But through looking at the other works of Foucault and after reassessing Discipline and Punishment I realized it was not that the prison system was the start of a disciplinary society rather it brings to question why the transition of prison systems in the late 18th century and in the beginning of the 19th century; a transition from

    Read More

More about Mass Incarceration In The Criminal Justice System

Open Document