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More handpicked essays just for you.
The war on drugs cause and effect
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Recommended: The war on drugs cause and effect
Directed and Produced by Ava DuVernay’s 13th explores the past of racial discrimination in the United States of America, concentrating on the statistic that the country's prison system is excessively packed with African-Americans. 13th is a documentary that everyone should watch, when I say everyone I mean everyone. Ranging from the civil class all the way to the high class. It paint a vivid picture of the inevitable and undisputable link of the legal and political scheme to the mass imprisonment of Black people, the “war on drugs”, was made to bring attention to this problems, show that the scale and brutality have not reduce but it is just easier to access nowadays. It specifically aimed America and Americans as a call for then to reexamine the prison system which was put in place as a response to the abolition of slavery. The documentary was …show more content…
We cannot say a judge should punish criminals not based on what they’ve been condemned of, but based on national imprisonment disparities. Yes, the degree of punishment might have been larger than they should have been which should have been the greater focus. DuVernay makes it seem that the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery was purposely constructed with a loophole that was meant to be used to continual enslave black people. It wasn’t loophole; Sentenced offenders can be deprived of liberty; it was just a reaffirmation of common sense. Where we even strong mistruth such as Woodrow Wilson didn’t say “The Birth of a Nation” was “history written with lightning.”, and Walmart hasn’t sold handguns since 1993; long guns are uncommonly used in murders so they weren’t backing ALEC because the wanted more people to buy more guns. Pay close attention to the newspaper headings and columns you notice most of the misdirecting and misleading
The movie 13th mainly discusses the problem of racism and mass incarceration after the civil war. Specifically, it is covered in the documentary that many poor black people were put in jail due to minor misbehaviors and were forced to work for the country under convict leasing. Moreover, black people were treated unfairly and sometimes were tortured unlawfully in the society. The “War on drugs” declared by conservative Republicans were biased against black community and resulted in a significant increase in incarceration in the late 20th. In addition, a lot of companies such as Walmart cooperated with States in terms of private prison constructions and gained a huge amount of profits as a result.
The creation of prisons and penal system was meant to be used to create an institution to detere crime and create rehabilitation. The ideas put into this new institution did not try to fight crime but instead use the institution as a way of social control. Blacks and Hispanics have become the target of social control as a way to keep the whites and minorities segregated through legal ways. The book Assata an Autobiography, follows the story of an African American women’s struggle with the racist south as well as the inhumane treatment of the penal system. Assata demonstrated the unlawful way police and justice system treat blacks, but not only was it this institution but society as a whole. The hypersexualization of being a black female and
Many Americans pretend that the days of racism are far behind; however it is clear that institutional racism still exists in this country. One way of viewing this institutional racism is looking at our nation’s prison system and how the incarceration rates are skewed towards African American men. The reasons for the incarceration rate disparity are argued and different between races, but history points out and starts to show the reason of why the disparity began. Families and children of the incarcerated are adversely affected due to the discrimination as well as the discrimination against African American students and their likelihood of going to prison compared to the white student. African American women are also affected by the discrimination in the incarceration rate. Many white Americans don’t see how racism affects incarceration rates, and that African Americans are more likely to face discrimination from the police as well as being falsely arrested.
In The New Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander introduces readers to the phenomenon of mass incarceration in the United States and challenges readers to view the crisis as the “ the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.” In the introduction, Alexander writes “what the book is intended to do and that is to stimulate much needed conversation about the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetuating racial hierarchy in the United States.” We come to understand, How the United States create criminal justice system and maintain racial hierarchy through mass incarceration? How the current system of mass incarceration in the United States mirrors earlier systems of racialized
America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, in which most inmates are Black and Hispanic. Blacks are perceived as socially deviant, so society easily deems them as being criminals. Assata Shakur was convicted and prosecuted for numerous charges, including resisting lawful arrest, possession of an illegal weapon, intention to kill, physical assault, robbery at several locations, and other charges (13). Although Shakur was not at the scene of these alleged crimes, law enforcement decisively arrested and charged her. If Shakur was White, rather than a Black woman, the legal system would have perceived her as innocent and treat her leniently. Nevertheless, Law Enforcement carries a bias prejudice towards Blacks, and benefits from their oppression. Similarly to the New Jim Crow, in which incarceration is utilized as a means to exploit Blacks and empower Whites. Shakur believes, “Prisons are a profitable business. They are a way of legally perpetuating slavery… They certainly aren’t planning to put white people in them. Prisons are part of this government’s genocidal war against Black and Third World People” (Shakur, 65). The privatization of prisons has increased and pursues to capitalize on minority inmates through the production of goods, while lawfully abiding by the 13th Amendment. Likewise, One who is convicted of an alleged crime is faced with a trial that is skewed to oppress Blacks from
Most black Americans are under the control of the criminal justice today whether in parole or probation or whether in jail or prison. Accomplishments of the civil rights association have been challenged by mass incarceration of the African Americans in fighting drugs in the country. Although the Jim Crow laws are not so common, many African Americans are still arrested for very minor crimes. They remain disfranchised and marginalized and trapped by criminal justice that has named them felons and refuted them their rights to be free of lawful employment and discrimination and also education and other public benefits that other citizens enjoy. There is exists discernment in voting rights, employment, education and housing when it comes to privileges. In the, ‘the new Jim crow’ mass incarceration has been described to serve the same function as the post civil war Jim crow laws and pre civil war slavery. (Michelle 16) This essay would defend Michelle Alexander’s argument that mass incarcerations represent the ‘new Jim crow.’
In Ava DuVernay’s film 13th she analyzes the pioneering events that led up to this toxic system known as the Prison Industrial Complex. She critically examines how the same golden ticket that, supposedly, granted our freedom was the same rabbit hole that kept black Americans in a cycle of slavery. DeVernay illuminates the ideology that if this system of “militarism, racism, and capital” could somehow manage to criminalize black Americans their institutions could continue and perhaps excel. Jordan Camp & Christina Heatherton’s Policing the Planet expounds upon this ideology that allowed those systems of “militarism, racism, and capital” to maintain power. Broken windows policing, “emerges as an ideological and political project,”(2) ideological in the sense of DeVernay’s examination of embedding criminality on the character of the
When the values of a people and the ethics of a country are systematically broken down, one begins to ponder about why the preposterous numbers are what they are. African Americans constitute about half of the prison inmates when they only make up about 13% of the United States population. There are many speculations as to why this is so. Some...
In the documentary, 13th, scholars, activists, and politicians scrutinize the 13th amendment and how it affects African Americans. The 13th amendment states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted shall exist within the United States, or any subject to their jurisdiction.” The “except as a punishment for crime” part was stressed heavily in the documentary. This section of the amendment created a loophole that led to prison boom over the years. The prison boom was basically a legal way to enslave African Americans again since America was now “land of the free.”
Nearly half of the more than two million Americans behind bars are African Americans. These statistics are well known and frequently cited by white and black Americans; for many they define “Black humanity”. (Ryan D. King, 2010) Since the end of slavery African Americans were believed to be prone to crime and in general a menace to American Society and are to blame for this disparity. While this minority population has broken the law and deserve retribution, they are ultimately products of their environment.
According to statistics since the early 1970’s there has been a 500% increase in the number of people being incarcerated with an average total of 2.2 million people behind bars. The increase in rate of people being incarcerated has also brought about an increasingly disproportionate racial composition. The jails and prisons have a high rate of African Americans incarcerated with an average of 900,000 out of the 2.2 million incarcerateed being African American. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 1 in 6 African American males has been incarcerated at some point in time as of the year 2001.
In the United States, the rate of incarceration has increased shockingly over the past few years. In 2008, it was said that one in 100 U.S. adults were behind bars, meaning more than 2.3 million people. Even more surprising than this high rate is the fact that African Americans have been disproportionately incarcerated, especially low-income and lowly educated blacks. This is racialized mass incarceration. There are a few reasons why racialized mass incarceration occurs and how it negatively affects poor black communities.
The definition of mass incarceration is a term used by social activists to describe the significant increase in the number of incarcerated people in United States ' prisons over the past forty years, from 1970 to 2005 the number of inmates has risen 700%. Lawrence (2011) has stated that more than 2.3 million people in America are in jail or prison and sixty percent are African American and Latino. In this paper, I will present information on mass incarceration of black males, the development of a racial injustice due to rising of incarceration rates, and the financial standing that the prison system has, due to its massive expansion.
According to the Oxford Index, “whether called mass incarceration, mass imprisonment, the prison boom, or hyper incarceration, this phenomenon refers to the current American experiment in incarceration, which is defined by comparatively and historically extreme rates of imprisonment and by the concentration of imprisonment among young, African American men living in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage.” It should be noted that there is much ambiguity in the scholarly definition of the newly controversial social welfare issue as well as a specific determination in regards to the causes and consequences to American society. While some pro arguments cry act as a crime prevention technique, especially in the scope of the “war on drugs’.
“Meanwhile the DEA teamed up with the CCA, They tryna lock niggas up, they tryna make new slaves.” The War on Drugs that started back in 1980 meant that U.S. prisons have experienced growth in imprisoners, especially of African-Americans, even though the white population is more likely to engage in the illegal drug industry. The consequence of this “increasing over-incarceration” of African-American men mean that 1 in 3 of them can expect to become imprisoned today. As Michelle Alexander writes, this can be interpreted as “The New Jim Crow” – racism is still an issue and African-Americans still experience exploitation and lack of freedom; just like the