Mass Incarceration In America
Several peculiar institutions have had the ability to effectively control, confine, and define blacks in America’s history. Systems included chattel slavery, which was the turning point of the plantation economy, the Jim Crow era legally upheld segregation and discrimination, and the mechanism of ghettos which are comprised of minorities, parallel to the collective proletarianization and urbanization of blacks. Lastly but not least, the carceral apparatus has helped to perpetuate a social and economic hierarchy, due to the subjugation of minorities, within the US directly affecting life outcomes of those who are directly and indirectly affected. According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, they are about 2.3 million people in jail, which …show more content…
The US abides by the motto of “Tough on Crime.” Citizen and political leaders believe that by employing incarceration as a persistent threat it will invite people to conform to social norms and discourage in engaging in illegal behavior. Although data shows that high incarceration in neighborhoods results in a future increase in crime. The perpetuation and reasons of mass incarceration come from prejudice ideologies and attitudes that are ingrained into the fabric of society. People of color are targeted, arrested, and punished for crimes. The criminal system operates on a hierarchy of individual liability over the demand and societal pressure”. By routinization of unequal protection from the legal system, black people are more vulnerable to be victimized by …show more content…
There are no overhead cost because prision are prepaid and all other aspects are paid for by taxpayer dollars. The government spends a total of 20 billion dollars a year In the 21st century prisoners can be view as a modern slave working laborious jobs without humane treatment. Inmates work to make profitable products for large corporations and are compensated by one of two ways. They are either able to make 0.13¢ up to $1.15 per hour, or in states such as Florida inmates can subtract time from their sentence in exchange for work, allowing private federal prisons to took in approximately five billion dollars total in revenue in
Summary Of The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander
1805 Words | 8 PagesMeanwhile, black people are often barred from serving on juries as a result of bizarre (yet ostensibly race-neutral) rules, meaning that many African Americans are tried by all-white juries. The deep racism of mass incarceration has been instituted through two broad steps: first, by giving law enforcement “extraordinary discretion” in who and how they approach, and second, by refusing to accept any charges of racism that do not identify a particular racist individual as the source of the problem. Alexander points out that anti-drug policy is particularly likely to be racially discriminatory because drugs are handled in a manner unlike any other crime. When an ordinary crime takes place, the victim (or someone acting on the victim’s behalf) alerts the authorities—the first step in the process of achieving justice. In the case of drugs, there isn’t a victim as such; both the buyer and seller of drugs have no incentive to call the police.
Summary Of The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander
1580 Words | 7 PagesToday mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.” We must change the
Mass Incarceration In Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow
358 Words | 2 PagesIt is an existing theory that our society is constructed via racial dimensions, and that racial equality is a figment of the imagination. This very principle is highlighted in Michelle Alexander’s novel, “The New Jim Crow.” The specific dimensions covered within the text include the unjust aspects of the federal drug policy, and by connection that of mass incarceration as well. Alexander claims that racism is still very prominent in present day society and is direct and frank about the heavy influence of white supremacy. One of the main arguments pushed by Alexander in this book is that mass incarceration is “ a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar
Summary Of The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander
694 Words | 3 PagesHowever, a number of African Americans, who were convicted of a felony, are disproportionately high nowadays. Michelle Alexander considers that It has led to the creation of “a new racial undercaste” (2010). Actually, in our time, discrimination affects every aspect of political, economic, and social life of the people who was charged with a serious criminal offence. In this regard, she mentions the law “banning drug felons from public housing …and denying them basic public benefits for life” (2010). We live in a “colorblind society” that pretends the racial disparity and discrimination do not exist.
Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness By Michelle Alexander
1006 Words | 5 PagesFor this semester, we read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. The book talks about how minorities face, especially black men, being treated like second-class citizens by the criminal justice system and this leading to our modern mass incarceration problem. Alexander goes as far as to say “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it” (2). This is shown by the War on Drugs.
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
1278 Words | 6 PagesAs our society has grown in a multitude of ways, it has remained the same concerning the systematic treatment of minority groups, especially African American people. Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow, writes about how America has encouraged and allowed the rebirth of a new caste system through implementation of mass incarceration (2011). The creation of this new system, only backed the critical race theory that argues white racism is constructed socially and historically in America (Simba 2015). She outlines that slavery and Jim Crow laws have been redesigned into the war on drugs which has allowed the police to target communities of color and therefore keep blacks in a position of inferiority. Many factors come into play
Mass Incarceration Analysis
975 Words | 4 Pagesarticle he focuses on the impact of mass incarceration on African American families and the challenges that they faced. He also includes the 1965 report “The Negro Family”. He also talked about different stories and victims, he gives data tables and graphs, and also digs up information from history. Coates article is 84 pages long so I am sure he had a lot to get off of his chest. Coates stated, “Family breakdown” “flows from centuries of oppression and persecution of the negro man.
Mass Incarceration Minority Communities
1100 Words | 5 PagesMass Incarceration and Minority Communities Mass incarceration within the United State of America is a controversial topic in politics today because of the negative effects it has on minority communities. “The United States leads the world in the percentage of its population that serves time in prison or jail.1,2 As of 2012, nearly 7 million men and women are on probation, parole, or under some other form of community supervision, which means that nearly 3% of the American adult population is currently involved in correctional supervision,” (Hatzenbuehler, Keyes, Hamilton, and Uddin, 2015). How does it affect the minority communities?
Incarceration And Racial Profiling
287 Words | 2 PagesAn institutional racism still faced both past and present can be found in incarceration and racial profiling. Our prison populations have skyrocketed since the 80 's and there is a disproportionate amount of black and Latino individuals who are incarcerated. Between New York’s stop and frisk policies and the insurmountable amounts of unarmed black and Latino men who are shot by police the discrimination by the police and law enforcement is clearly evident. Although black and Latino drivers are less likely than white to be carrying drug and other contraband the majority of car pulled over are the cars of black and Latino divers. The racial profiling is just one reason for the disproportionate black and Latino prison population.
Racial Injustice
605 Words | 3 PagesAs we have learned in previous readings, people relate crime to the typical criminal which is characterized as black, poor, urban and male. This racial typification has led to greater social control, which currently aims at reducing crime and deviance, as stated in our previous reading. We also know that media, specifically the news plays a big role in perpetuated these racial stereotypes and fear through the selection of the violent crimes and criminals they portray. This perpetuated fear affects mainly whites, which leads to their support in harsher punishments and policies that are directed towards blacks because whites support the idea that crime is racial as evidenced through their exaggeration of black involvement in violent crime and burglary. Of course, other variables like education, religious beliefs, and racial prejudice impact this view that crime is a racial activity, but even after controlling for these mainly whites still use racially typification to substantially support harsh punishments and polices.
Prison Vs. US Prison System
599 Words | 3 PagesThat is, more and more American prisons are being run by for-profit companies. Studies showed that there are 133,000 state and federal prisoners housed in privately owned prisons in the U.S., constituting 8.4% of the overall U.S. prison population. Corporations such as Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group both combined earn around $2.53 billion in revenue (Thierry, 2017). The United States use their prisons as more of business to make profit than Hong Kong who uses it to control their
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.
Essay On African Americans In Prison
1034 Words | 5 PagesThere are more African Americans in prison now, than there were enslaved in 1850. These individuals are not in prison because they are committing more crimes than their white counterparts, but because of a discriminatory system that targets african americans. Blacks can commit the same crimes as whites, but are more likely to be imprisoned and or receive a steeper sentence. This disproportionate racial sentencing has been a growing issue the United States for four decades, and started with the Reagan Administration's War On Drugs. Private prison organizations lobby for harsher punishments, and profit from the influx of inmates.
Correctional Health Care
1368 Words | 6 PagesCorrectional Health Care United States ranks the highest when it comes to the incarceration rate of its own citizens. The prevailing population of federal and state prisoners stands at more than 2.4 million or around 1 adult male to every 100. If you believe in a lesser sentencing for non-violent offenders, or support the idea of casting aside the key on every prisoner, we all can recognize that the bottom line of incarcerating prisoners is mind boggling. As it stands, the current cost of confinement per prisoner is approximately around $32,000 a year, this amount is also determined by the location, as well the prison being a state or federal facility. It is the responsibility of the National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC)
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