The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration Analysis

In her book, The New Jim Crow Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander who was a civil rights lawyer and legal scholar, reveals many of America’s harsh truths regarding race within the criminal justice system. Though the Jim Crow laws have long been abolished, a new form has surfaced, a contemporary system of racial control through mass incarceration. In this book, mass incarceration not only refers to the criminal justice system, but also a bigger picture, which controls criminals both in and out of prison through laws, rules, policies and customs. The New Jim Crow that Alexander speaks of has redesigned the racial caste system, by putting millions of mainly blacks, as well as Hispanics and some whites, behind bars

When I hear the words judicial system I think of people age 18 or older and committed a heinous crime. However, in the U.S. that is not the case. The U.S. is known for having the highest rate of children imprisonment. The system force children to become what the system identify them as which is another statistic. In my opinion, the judicial system is slavery just in a different form because the U.S. is making money off of them, stripping them of their humanity, and giving them no type of hope for the future.

Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, summarizes the justice and prison systems as an unfair institutions that push low-level offenders into detention centers with harsh sentences due to the “tough on crime” stance of major politicians on both sides of the aisle. Alexander brings up the case of Florida vs Bostick, where stop-and-frisk procedures have somewhat violated the fourth amendment. In Bostick’s case the US Supreme Court believed that if he were a “reasonable person”, he could have refused the search, but most do not realize that arrests can still take place, even in a reasonable situation, when someone does not comply with an officer. As crazy at it may seem, the innocent in some cases often go unheard because of the fear, power, and lack of resources to fight back. Many succumb to pleading guilty and never have the opportunity to speak with a lawyer or public defender.

Linda Laidlaw and Suzanna So-har Wong wrote an article which addressed the difficulties found on the personal writing assignments. By using interviews and focus-groups date, Linda and Suzanna got to the conclusion that such assignments are challenging for students that come from diverse cultural background, families or life history. Many elementary teachers ask their students to share information about themselves or their lives. By using personal narrative, teachers assign her/his students to do projects such as “write about yourself”, “All about me”, “When I was born”, etc, which have created a problem for those parents and students that do not share the same cultural background or family’s composition.

Prisons are meant to detain those that are deemed unjust by society, based on legislation enacted by all in order to maintain order. Due to this, the average person regards prisoners as dangerous people unfit to live freely amongst others. This stereotyping of prisoners makes frequent appearances in Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, a title that recounts his journey as a lawyer over the past few decades. A Harvard Law School graduate, he finds himself intrigued with defending those wrongly facing the strictest punishments allowed: prison for life or even the death sentence. Initially at the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, Stevenson eventually manages to move to Montgomery where he establishes the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), in an attempt

The inequality is that minorities like African Americans are simply discriminated against. This documentary is pointing out social issues that has a lot of agitating moments for me. The film tackles police shootings, mandatory minimum sentences, The Birth of a Nation (film by Nate Parker), and lots other related topics. One example for me is, how can our country be the number one incarcerator in the world?

As life goes on you continue to see a lot of stuff from the past and how life repeats itself. I was reading a book about Emmet Till called “Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of The Emmet Till Case.” I really feel like college students should read this book. This book teaches us stuff about or past that we just do not know. I truly feel like this book would have a great impact on my students in my class.

The experience and effects of solitary confinement on US inmates are frighteningly similar to the experiences of many prisoners of war, who’ve been tortured abroad. These similarities should be enough to convince us of the inhumanity of prolonged isolation. Additionally, the only real argument for solitary confinement (that its necessary in combating prison violence) is proven largely irrelevant by evidence suggesting that widespread use of solitary confinement does not make prisons less violent, but can increase violence in individual prisoners, and make them less capable of reintegrating into larger communities. Many prison systems have begun to experiment with safer alternatives to solitary, often with excellent results. In Mississippi, for example, prisons began incentivizing solitary inmates with time out of their cell to play basketball or interact with others in exchange for good behavior (Walters & Maine, 2014).

I got to see a side of the criminal justice system that I have never seen before. After writing multiple papers on the War on Drugs, I am completely aware of the injustices it entails. Federal lawmakers impact lower-level, nonviolent drug defendants with their enactment of mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, even though they are attempting to target high-level distributors. Incarceration of these people destroys their lives because a criminal conviction makes it harder to live a productive life as you are not eligible for certain jobs, loans, etc. All things considered, my experience at the King County Drug Diversion Court opened my eyes to some of the changes occurring in our justice system in regards to the War on Drugs.

By killing felons, the death penalty removes the burden of housing them within the penitentiary system. Prison overcrowding and overstretched resources are key issues in prisons in many countries. Due to the severity of prisoners’ crimes on death row, it costs much more to feed, house, and seclude these often dangerous inmates than if they were simply put to death. And if they were paroled, there is always the chance they could re-offend, which is completely eliminated with the death penalty. The concept of retribution, that the perpetrator is punished in a manner fitting to the crime, is also used to support the death penalty.

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

Prison is the last place Bigger dreamed he would end up. The road to this prison was paved by the side effects of the racism he had dealt with in his life. The psychological effects of racism on African Americans consistently pave a road that ends in incarceration. Bigger shows that these effects can affect his self – worth, inhibit social interactions, and change the way he sees himself. The book foreshadowed the consequences of racism on Bigger 's psyche from the beginning with the apartment scene.

However, I believe it is the inmate 's life choices that determine whether they re-offend or not. Latino 's would most likely re-think before re-offending due to the racial profiling that was done in the jail. Some may say the harsh circumstances that Sheriff Arpaio provided were inhumane and humiliating to the inmates. The Tent City was widely known worldwide, and deterred others from committing a crime; in order to, not end up in the

First, I want to examine a particularly critical review of Alexander’s text by Joseph D. Osel. According to Joseph D. Osel’s, “while Alexander’s book claims to be concerned with exposing and describing the history and mechanisms of mass incarceration of the American ‘caste system,’ which affect the poor and people of color systematically and disproportionately, her work systematically, strangely, and empathically excludes these voices” (OSEL Whitewash). Osel goes on to contend that Alexander’s work provides the history of criminal justice and imprisonment with a “vast rhetorical and historical facelift where the most relevant and affected voices on the topic at hand are safely expunged from the discussion, from relevance, from history” (OSEL

This is how I interpreted after I read what he actually said, “There is here no need of declamatory vehemence; we live in an age of commerce and computation; let us therefore coolly enquire what is the sum of evil which the imprisonment of debtors bring upon our country.” Johnson also uses his analysis that he has done his research on as he is concluding his final statement to this letter to the lawmaker. There are two parts to this of what he is trying to get the lawmaker to realize about these people that he is ruining there lives. Johnson says, “According to the rule generally received, which supposes that one in thirty dies yearly, the race of man may be said to be renewed at the end of thirty years.” In this last paragraph, Johnson finishes off his argument about how everyone is to be treated the same whether or not of how much money they own to their name.