1. “African-American crime groups used the drug trade as much as their Irish, Jewish, and Italians predecessors used bootlegging” (Abadinsky, 2013, p.170). It wasn’t until the time of the Vietnam War that black crime groups were exposed and succeeded in the heroin business. Prior to the war Abadinsky (2013) explains that “black crime groups were dependent on American Mafia Families for their heroin” (p.170). In time, black crime groups were able to conduct business with suppliers in Thailand, without the American Mafia. In addition to the heroin business African American criminals ruled the numbers racket in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago until they were runoff by white superiors including Dutch Schultz and Sam Giancana.
2. In comparing Asian Organized Crime and the Mafia
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Asian Organized Crime and the Mafia encompass a strong sense of family loyalty, however Asian Organized Crime incorporates loyalty to friendships. The Yakuza, just as the Mafia, enforce elaborate initiation ceremonies. Initiation into the Mafia requires sponsorship by a member while for the Yakuza “recruitment is accomplished by ‘talent scouts’ who scour hangouts most likely to attract young delinquents” (Abadinsky, 2013, p.200). The Triads and the Mafia use elaborate initiation ceremonies which include a member sponsorship and a blood oath. More so, the Triads and the Mafia use a hierarchical structure in which Asians are said to be born into a hierarchically organized society. There is a difference in dress code/appearance between Asian Organized Crime and the Mafia. Asian Organized Crime incorporates a strict ritual dress code in which tattoos are acceptable in excess while the Mafia does not enforce a dress code or a tattoo policy. According to Abadinsky (2013)
Do you remember reading about the slave trade in our history books? And how Abraham Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation which abolished slavery. But yet, under the 13th Amendment one is forced to involuntary slavery when convicted of a crime. Yes, it is the year 2017 and we can say slavery still exist. Saying that slavery was “Abolished” would be deceptive from my part, I believe it was put to an end but then reconstructed into the American Prison System.
When the voting act of 1965 was passed, it was viewed as a turning point for segregation in America. As if it described in history textbooks, it is when all forms of racism were abolished – on paper. However, it was not at all like that. Racism then had to be discreet and systems that were built on racism were never reformed and instead, instilled systematic and institutional racism. In her book, “The New Jim Crow”, Michelle Alexander speaks on the injustices she has viewed and relates them all back to the concept that racism was reformed to fit into today’s society through systems and institutions.
Prison is a dark, lonely and terrible place. A majority of people incarcerated are people of color. Mass incarceration is mainly concentrated on racial and ethnic minorities. In A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines, it is shown that no matter your background or your story, you will still be targeted because of the color of your skin. Brown assures that The United States has only five percent of the world’s population, but twenty five of the world’s prison population.
In Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow she states that there is a new racial caste system—mass incarceration—in America. Alexander argues that the prior racial caste system, Jim Crow, has not ended—it’s merely been redesigned. Alexander’s main argument is that in this current era of colorblindness, it is not permissible to discriminate on the basis of race hence mass incarceration labels people of color as criminals and then uses all the practices that were “supposedly left behind”. Alexander uses the term racial caste because mass incarceration, like Jim Crow and slavery, were systems that denoted a stigmatized racial group and forced them into a permanent inferior position by law.
Thao Tran Professor Aboulian English 1C 21 March 2017 The War on Drugs: A Rhetorical Analysis The War on Drugs, which was declared by President Nixon in 1971, efforts to control drug use and sales in inner-city neighborhoods. The government has been recently targeting poor communities of color. In 1980, the skyrocketing drug arrests reflected a surge in illegal drug activity. In The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, the author also stated that “huge cash grants were made to those law enforcement agencies that were willing to make drug-law enforcement a top priority” (73).
Organized crime, especially as it is thought of today, represent greed, anarchy, and a complete disregard for the lives of other human beings. With the added knowledge of hindsight, however, people today are able to better represent and highlight the important factors leading to organized crime and those who represented it. To understand the lives of those who created the organized crime of today, one must understand the circumstances of the lives of those in the 1920s. The 1920s, while seemingly pleasant and jovial, was a point of dismay and financial instability for the majority of the country. Credit became an integral part of financial upkeep, but was not a sustainable way to support the economy in the long run.
Racial profiling, poverty and high crime rates are the major contributors to high incarceration rates for African Americans compared to their percent of the general population. Besides social and economic isolation, African Americans have been marked as inherently criminal with the war on drugs and crime targeting them even when the statics shows they are less likely to be in possession of cocaine for example (Walker, Spohn, DeLone, 2012). The high number of African Americans on death row is the result of institutional racism. Majority of the judges in the United States are white and more often than not are either implicitly or explicitly biased in their rulings (Walker, Spohn, DeLone, 2012).
The government publicized the emergence of crack cocaine as defense strategy to create a favorable public opinion for the drug war: “The media was saturated with images of black crack whores, crack dealers, and crack babies—images that seemed to conform the worst negative racial stereotypes about impoverished inner-city residents” (Alexander, 5). During the war, arrests and convictions for drug offenses saw an amazing increase, especially among African Americans. Because of the drug war, the United States now holds the highest incarceration rate in the world even surpassing more the world’s most suppressive nations. No other country imprisons more of their racial or ethnic minorities than the United States does: “The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of Apartheid” (Alexander, 6). The War on Drugs fueled mass imprisonment in the United States in which African American were the main victims.
Their Escape from the War The Vietnam War was a difficult time for soldiers and the people on the home front. The soldiers were experiencing a completely different type of war, guerilla warfare. It was complete chaos and there were no organized battles or anyway to get a good attack on the Vietnamese soldiers, or the Vietcong as they were called. The soldiers were having to do unethical things and go against their will by killing these people.
This is evidence that African American communities are more inclined to have drug dealers and possible drug users. “However, drug selling activity does not accurately indicate that drug use and dependency are in certain neighborhoods and this fuels a strong misperception about patterns of drug abuse in American society” (King., Mauer, p.21, 2007). Therefore, the targeting towards African American community’s primarily due to this data may not be accurate. This also causes law enforcement to ignore other communities that might be heavily influenced by drug dealers. This is one practice that needs to change, not only throughout drug policies and sentencing laws but throughout the
By the preliminary year of 1990s, the crack period that engulfed New York City in the 1980s was on the path to failure and delinquency percentages were correspondingly decreasing. But Randol Contreras noticed something special on the roads in South Bronx community where he grew up. Randol observed how his drug-distributing friends were no longer making money from retailing crack, but were revolving to mugging other dealers for a progressively deteriorating segment of the drug domain. Randol Contreras wrote the book, The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream. Randol shadowed a unit of Dominican males from streets of New York who were born at the end of the Crack Era.
Our world is a very unique and everyday changing environment which brings many different experiences upon us. As we grow older by the day we learn and adapt to different environments. With population on the rise across our plant, people are starting to get more and more comfortable with fast incomes and negative ways to get around barriers that life has to offer us. Organized crime has been around for as long as human kind has existed, from Ancient Greece to today’s 21st century. Organized crime is always increasing as market demands go up, and the competition for wealth skyrockets.
The War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration The United States incarcerates at a higher rate than any other country in the world. In fact, the U.S. alone is home to 25% of the world’s prison population; this, however, wasn’t always the case. The rapid growth of the U.S. prison population can be traced two decades back to the declaration of the War on Drugs by President Ronald Regan in the early eighties and previously mentioned by President Richard Nixon. In an effort to reassure White Americans’ of their elite positioning in the underlying racial caste system in a time where inner-city communities were facing major economic collapses, the Regan administration called for the reinforcement of the sale, distribution, and consumption of illicit drugs,
Deviance has many functions in society. Although deviance violates social norms, without it, we would not have rules, so it helps form, guide, and shape society’s norms and goals. Social norms are different from culture to culture. Norms that may be acceptable in one culture may be frowned upon in another. Emile Durkheim quotes that “deviance and deviant behavior is an integral part of all healthy societies (Adler, 2014, p74).”
The way to rise up in the world and achieve power is through the use of violence, and with power, comes money. Despite this, it doesn’t condemn the mafia, but rather we are given the opportunity to make our decision on who is morally just and who