Michelle Alexander The Lockdown Analysis

The intention of my research is to expose the racist tactics in the criminal justice system that have been camouflaged. I am prepared to explain how racism contributes to the vast number of incarcerated African Americans, and other minorities. The criminal justice system has created and perpetuated racial hierarchy in the United States, and has done so throughout history. I propose the question: Are minorities being targeted within the Criminal Justice System? African Americans are criminalized and targeted because of their skin color, and it is not fair. This argument connects to the theory of Law in the Book vs. Law in Action, and relates to how this type of discrimination from the law affects society. In particular, the way the Law is written in codes, statutes, judicial opinions that supposedly support the righteousness of justice, is a far cry from the way the Law actually operates. Despite substantial progress in recent years, racial discrimination remains a significant problem in the United States. I will prove this argument with the help of various peer-reviewed articles, and non-scholarly article that examine this unequal behavior.

Assurance in equal justice remains as an overwhelming political principle of American culture. Yet withstanding unbelief exists among numerous racial and ethnic minorities. Their doubt comes as no surprise, given a past filled with differential treatment in the arrangement of criminal equity, an issue particularly clear in police misconduct. Researchers have investigated police responses to racial and ethnic minorities for quite some time, offering sufficient confirmation of minority burden on account of police. These examinations raise doubt about different police techniques of coercive control, maybe none more so than police brutality. Its use exemplifies the pressures between police and minorities that exist in America today.

Many people claim that racism no longer exists; however, the minorities’ struggle with injustice is ubiquitous. In the “Anything Can Happen With Police Around”: Urban Youth Evaluate Strategies of Surveillance in Public Places,” Michelle Fine and his comrades were inspired to conduct a survey over one of the major social issues - how authority figures use a person’s racial identity as a key factor in determining how to enforce laws and how the surveillance is problematic in public space. In the beginning of the article, she used the existed survey reports to support and justify their purpose to perform this survey. The survey analyzed urban youth interactions with authority figures, comprising police, educators, social workers and security guards.

There are numerous issues that deal with the American criminal justice system, but the two I found most prominant that occur on a daily basis is the abuse from police officers and clear racism shown by the American criminal justice system. To begin, racism as we know is a prejudice directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior. In the criminal justice system African Americans are directly targeted and punished in a higher more aggressive way, than say someone who is caucasian and committed the same exact crime. Racism is more often than not, the motive for official misconduct. There are examples of racism from every known region in the United States, spanning across centuries from slavery to

Racial issues are sometimes dismissed as history; they are thought of as issues of the past. People sometimes believe that since the government preaches equality, that most racial issues are resolved. This is not the case in today’s society, as racial issues are still prevalent in everyday life. Not only facing discriminatory practices in the job market, minorities face racism in many different aspects of everyday life. In the world we live in today, people tend to judge a whole group of people based on the actions of only a few. It is ironic that in the country that was founded on immigrants from every corner of the world can have people that discriminate against those that are from different ethnicities than them. There is a significant

Police believes they don’t have to respect people of color ,and think it 's okay to mistreat them instead.The officers been discriminating people of color because they assume every african american are criminal and bad.They harass people of color just to make them feel intimidate. The police kill innocent black people and don 't get charged guilty at all.There’s three side of people which is the people who get affected by it, the people who overlooks it, and the people who just don 't care.

In Michelle Alexander’s book, “The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness,” Alexander addresses a topic that many may not know is happing. Alexander addresses the racism towards people of color by using the legal system as a tool to legally segregate people of color as well as poor whites. Alexander touches upon the way politicians use the war on drugs as an excuse to build more jails to incarcerate poor people of color. She also talks about the way police use racial profiling.

The severity of racial profiling is very concerning. As proven by numerous texts studied for this Expository Writing class, it is evident that the Black respondents of Otis Johnson’s poll, analyzing citizens’ relationships with the police, are not the only Black people that: “expressed far less confidence than whites in local police to treat both races equally” (Johnson). In White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, Peggy McIntosh describes various privileges which sound ordinary, though surprisingly only White people have. Among them, is one that affects all people on a daily basis: “If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race” (McIntosh). Governmental

Racial profiling by law enforcement is an overwhelmingly useless and prevalent expression of hate and ignorance to this day. Internationally, a wide variation of races are unrightfully discriminated against by the enforcements who are supposedly there to protect them. Jim Crow policing is an issue that undoubtedly continues, no matter the amount of riots or unjustly arrested/ murdered civilians. Cases like Trayvon Martin, and Mike Brown, as well as Bob Herbert 's article Jim Crow Policing published in the New York Times, February 2nd 2010, explain first hand accounts and statistics to give examples of the fact that racial profiling from the police force consistently takes place.

The killing of a young African American Michael Brown by white police officer Daren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014 shed a light on something that had long been ignored by the white population of the USA, the obvious inequality between black and white individuals in the criminal justice system. This racial bias is no longer based on explicit racism which was outlawed by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, instead it is influenced by implicit racial bias present in all aspects of the criminal justice system resulting in implicit assumptions that lead to quick and prejudice judgments based on negative stereotypes by the actors of the criminal justice system especially law enforcements which lead the uneven usage of “stop and

Being born in America in 1933 has shown to impact Susan Sontag, a liberal author and human rights advocate, when she stated, “I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future,” on Quotestoknow.com. Susan Sontag, born in the great depression, has set the scene for To Kill A Mockingbird in an extremely powerful way. The citizens in To Kill A Mockingbird experience prejudice in many different ways.

Racial profiling is a very important issue that individuals in society face every day. This problem occurs in low income or poverty-stricken areas throughout cities and communities across the nation. Hundreds of anecdotal testimonials allege that law enforcement officials at all levels of government are infringing upon the constitutional rights and civil liberties of racial and ethnic minorities through a practice called “racial profiling” (Ward, 2002). So what is racial profiling? According to the National Institute of Justice, racial profiling by law enforcement is commonly defined as a practice that targets people for suspicion of crime based on their race, ethnicity, religion or national origin (National Institute of Justice, 2013). The

Our law enforcement sometimes judges people on their race or ethnicity. The police decide who they consider suspicious, that discretion is routinely exercised through race. People believe some shouldn’t be allowed in places because of it. The color of our skin daren’t portray the lives that we live on a daily basis, that is what’s wrong with today’s society. Police disproportionately target minorities as criminal suspects, skewing at the outset the racial composition. There is no reason to believe that racism is more prevalent among police officers than among other professionals. They pull people over that seem suspicious and hope that something in their car that’s suspicious enough that will give them the right to search it.

The topic for this research proposal project is on community policing, and the factors that are involved in determining if relationships between law enforcement and citizens in these neighborhoods are strained. In order to be successful, community policing must be built on trust, as both civilians and law enforcement must work hand in hand to protect their communities. If there is a lack of trust, then these programs becomes broken, and can therefore lead to other violence and criminal acts.

Racial profiling is a longstanding, national problem in the United States of America. Racial profiling occurs everyday, in cities and towns across the country, when law enforcement and private security target people of color and humiliating and often frightening them with searches without evidence of anything related to a crime. This profiling is based on race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion. Citizens in America always assume that when an official is detaining a person of color it is because of discrimination but in another point of view it is the right action. I agree that Racial Profiling is wrong but in some cases it is justifiable .