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Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness By Michelle Alexander

1006 Words5 Pages

For 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. The idea of race and other concepts that have to do with race were thought up by white people to create a divide between them and other races. This was used to justified their treatment of African Americans and killing of the Native Americans (23). This allowed white people to create a supremacy where they were on top despite the fact that the Constitution is considered colorblind (25). Eventually the populist party, the party that supported blacks as equals, was getting popular. This caused the south to create Jim Crow laws to segregate black people despite giving them the same rights as white people (33-34). The court case, Brown v. Board of Education ended the Jim Crow laws (35). Due to not legally being able to segregate black people, conservatives decided to use law …show more content…

The labeling effect is when somebody comes out of prison or jail, but are still seen as a criminal because they went to prison or jail. The law allows former criminals to be deny for housing or jobs on the basis that they were in prison or jail (144). This leads to people who are labeled to have a hard time getting jobs, a home, and being part of the community as they are seen as bad people (141). Since the War on Drugs puts so many poor black people in prison, we have make people with already difficult lives, lives more difficult. This could potentially lead to the person doing more crime as they may feel like they have little choice on what to do since everyone sees them as a

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