Review Of Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness By Michelle Alexander
Introduction In the world we live in it seems as though no matter how many rules or legislation that is made there will always be some form of racial disparity under disguise. This critique will be an exploration of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. Alexander is civil rights lawyer and advocate in the United States that has been writing books since the early 2000’s and has become an opinion columnist for The New York Times in 2018. As an African American much of her work has been involved in the push for civil rights and racial equality in the world. Her thesis for the book is that the criminal justice system in the United States has brought back the disparity in race that was first experienced …show more content…
The first chapter looks at how the racial caste system came to be in the United States as a way of controlling labor. The second chapter looks at how the system has slowly evolved throughout history and the impact that the civil rights movement has had in affecting that evolution. It also looks at how supreme court decisions in the past hundred years have changed the way officers have been allowed to act. The third chapter looks at the idea that the justice system has become a means for class control. In particularly in the form of the “War on Drugs” creating a disproportionate amount of people of color incarcerated for nonviolent offenses and how police departments are financially incentivized to prioritize their efforts towards drug offenses. The fourth chapter explores how the system of mass incarceration affects African American communities both during incarceration and after being released with the title of being a felon. The fifth chapter is where the author explains the title of the book, being the idea of how the “Age of Colorblindness” has created a world where the discrimination is harder to witness from the outside since it is under the disguise of the criminal justice system. This chapter also compares the potential for harm in the modern system to the harm that came from the Jim Crow laws. The sixth and final chapter explores the ideas of how the status quo in society makes it harder to dismantle the system of mass
Review Of Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness By Michelle Alexander
990 Words | 4 PagesThe New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a non fiction book written by Michelle Alexander, a well known civil rights lawyer, is a book that every American citizen should read. Alexander’s book cover is of three metal bars and two strong black hands holding them tightly. The book spent multiple weeks on The New York Times bestsellers list and has a foreword written by Cornel West, he is a well known and respected social activist. The book discuss how the new system of oppression for people of color in the United States is mass incarceration. Jim Crow laws were a systematic way to segregate and discriminate against black people.
Theme Of Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness By Michelle Alexander
2532 Words | 11 PagesIn her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, author Michelle Alexander explores complex themes of oppression, discrimination, and how the United States criminal justice system has been disproportionately affecting Black communities for decades. Alexander outlines and analyzes the rise and fall of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and mass incarceration, as well as the War on Drugs and how the prison system continues to put Black men in bondage. Alongside this, she explores the limitations that incarceration places on Black men, the impact this has on their lives, and how society can work to combat the system. The novel is particularly relevant to the field of community psychology, as it highlights several ways that incarceration has affected the well-being and communities of those in bondage.
Analysis Of The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander
2995 Words | 12 PagesAuthor’s argument #1 In her book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander uses a large-scale historical analysis to conceptualize the intractable failures of the American incarceration system. Central to her overall argument is the claim that the prison system was intentionally designed to perpetuate the discrimination and social death of Black people in an era where laws permit outright anti-Black legislation. In order to support her historical analysis of the motivation behind the carceral system, Alexander traces the fall of formally racist institutions to modern legislation that, she argues, accomplishes the same goal without using explicitly racist language. Alexander engages in a three-step investigation into the process that transformed
Racial Caste System In The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander
652 Words | 3 PagesIn 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.
The Prison Industrial Complex By Angela Davis
467 Words | 2 PagesThe Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues written by Angela Davis explains her personal experiences growing up in Birmingham, Alabama during a time of racial segregation, capitalism and an unjust prison system. With the use of her personal experience and scholarly research, activist Davis investigates the institutionalized biases that support the criminal justice system in order to identify potential reforms that could result in a more just and equal society. In the chapter “The Prison Industrial Complex”, Davis highlights the relationship between the criminal justice system and people of color/immigrants. Several issues are addressed such as fear of crime and the reality of prisons, creation of public enemies, conditions which produce the prison industrial complex, structural connections and
The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander
720 Words | 3 PagesThe New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is a non-fiction introduction in the novel “They say, I say” by Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russel Durst. The New Jim Crow is written to educate society on the discrimination and exclusion that African Americans are facing in the United States; the same discrimination and exclusion they faced when the Jim Crow laws took place. Michelle Alexander forms her evidence from her own experience fighting for the civil rights of others and she also uses people of colors experiences with losing their civil rights from being labeled a “felon” and she uses statistics to help her readers better visualize the extent of African American incarceration, these techniques provide the readers with accurate
Review Of Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness By Michelle Alexander
983 Words | 4 PagesANNOTATED 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.
Michelle Alexander The Lockdown Analysis
718 Words | 3 PagesWe live in a society where ethnic minorities are target for every minimal action and/or crimes, which is a cause to be sentenced up to 50 years in jail. African Americans and Latinos are the ethnic minorities with highest policing crimes. In chapter two of Michelle Alexander’s book, The Lockdown, we are exposed to the different “crimes” that affects African American and Latino minorities. The criminal justice system is a topic discussed in this chapter that argues the inequality that people of color as well as other Americans are exposed to not knowing their rights. Incarceration rates, unreasonable suspicions, and pre-texts used by officers are things that play a huge role in encountering the criminal justice system, which affects the way
The New Jim Crow Analysis
1721 Words | 7 PagesMichelle 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.
Racial Bias In The Criminal Justice System
1044 Words | 5 PagesOne of the biggest controversies in society today is concerning whether or not the criminal justice system is racially bias. It is clear that blacks are overrepresented in America’s prison system. For example, they are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of white people and “constitute for nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population” (Criminal Justice). Although this is true, the disproportionate number of black men serving time in the criminal justice system is due to circumstance, not necessarily race. While there are some judges, police officers, or other officials who may have a racial bias towards black people, in the majority of cases blacks are not arrested because their race, they are arrested because they
Essay On African Americans In The Criminal Justice System
976 Words | 4 PagesSoon after slavery was abolished in the south, as a form of retaliation, southern states utilized “criminal justice for racial control”(Eji). All in all, by using criminal justice for racial control, the south effectively executed the mass incarceration of African Americans, which had become so deeply ingrained in American society that it is still present in today’s world. Not only are black people in disadvantaged communities, but they are constantly criminalized, and because of this, represent a high percentage of the prison population. The effects of slavery are still present in the current criminal justice system and it is important to acknowledge that even though efforts are being made to reduce its presence, it will likely take decades to fully eradicate the racial bias that African Americans face in the criminal justice system. Furthermore, slavery contributed to the racial bias in the criminal justice system by forming a gap
13th Essay
881 Words | 4 PagesIt highlights the system's persistent racial biases and systemic inadequacies, suggesting that racial superiority was maintained by discriminatory laws and practices even after slavery was legally abolished. Mass incarceration is shown in the movie as a modern form of racialized social control that promotes poverty, disenfranchisement, and institutional racism. Through interviews, it analyzes the catastrophic impact on individuals and communities, challenging viewers to critically evaluate the relationship between race, politics, and criminal justice, and arguing for serious reform and a reevaluation of cultural
New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander: Book Review
666 Words | 3 PagesMichelle Alexander argues in her introduction to the New Jim Crow that the racial caste in America has not ended and that it just has been redesigned. She highlights the ways that the justice system of the United States controls blacks through deliberately imposed legal restrictions. The United States has the leading incarceration rates in the world and most of the individuals involved with the country’s correctional system are African-American men. This essay seeks to discuss the author’s overall argument in the book. The essay will also discuss how the topics in the first three chapters of the book help Alexander develop this argument.
Annotated Bibliography: The New Jim Crow
1343 Words | 6 PagesAnnotated 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.
Justifiable Inequality Chapter Summary
519 Words | 3 PagesChapter seven dealt extensively with race and racial prejudice, issues that most people would like to see eradicated, but some still believe to be ever present. Souryal’s literature, which deals with real life situations as well as theory behind it, presents some interesting but unfortunate cases where people are mistreated or biased against for nothing more than their race. Racial prejudice is wrong and shouldn’t have any bearing on the justice system, but unfortunately—due to things like racial profiling—there are still cases where a precedent is set and police act, either consciously or unconsciously, against minorities instead of criminals. Strange concepts, such as justifiable inequality, were explained—this, in particular, was a concept I knew nothing about before reading Souryal’s chapter on it. The chapter also went into great depth about serious issues like discrimination and stereotyping, especially how stereotypes about minorities, which are perpetrated by a very small percentage of them, lead to police misconduct and police stereotypes that hurt many upstanding citizens who are black or Latino.
More about Review Of Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness By Michelle Alexander
Review Of Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness By Michelle Alexander
990 Words | 4 PagesTheme Of Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness By Michelle Alexander
2532 Words | 11 PagesAnalysis Of The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander
2995 Words | 12 PagesRacial Caste System In The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander
652 Words | 3 PagesThe Prison Industrial Complex By Angela Davis
467 Words | 2 PagesThe New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander
720 Words | 3 PagesReview Of Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness By Michelle Alexander
983 Words | 4 PagesMichelle Alexander The Lockdown Analysis
718 Words | 3 PagesThe New Jim Crow Analysis
1721 Words | 7 PagesRacial Bias In The Criminal Justice System
1044 Words | 5 PagesEssay On African Americans In The Criminal Justice System
976 Words | 4 Pages13th Essay
881 Words | 4 PagesNew Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander: Book Review
666 Words | 3 PagesAnnotated Bibliography: The New Jim Crow
1343 Words | 6 PagesJustifiable Inequality Chapter Summary
519 Words | 3 Pages