In a perfect world, we would not have racial tensions and we would all sing Kumbaya together, however, we do not live inside a perfect world. Racial injustice that relates to incarceration in the United States, specifically to those who are African-Americans, is a literal fabrication of our imperfect world and details the thinly veiled allegory of our social apartheid. According to author Glenn Loury, this aspect of our nation’s prison system is the most damaging to our African-American community, wherein said group are being racially profiled and “trapped in the dark vestiges of the ghetto” (Loury, 2008, 57). In his ethnography, Race, Incarceration, and American Values, Loury highlights these troubling trends concerning the dehumanization of African-Americans through our current sociopolitical landscape. The author begins his ethnography by giving us insight of the crime rate in the 1990s. He described this subject as the “age of drive-by shootings, drug deals gone bad, crack cocaine, and gangsta rap” ( ) that dominated the talk of the time. This type of ideology led our society to believe that we should put massive …show more content…
As Loury and Karlan point out, incarcerated black individuals become disenfranchised due to the “draconian laws” of our judiciary system ( ). However, where have we seen this in an actual life scenario where it counts? The answer is the United States presidential election of 2000. Here, George W. Bush defeated Al Gore and won the state by approximately 500 votes. The relevance of this is astonishing, because, according to Loury, Florida disenfranchises the most black individuals than any other state due to incarceration ( ). The black voters had the power to literally alter to course of our American history by potentially swaying the state in favor of Al Gore, that is if they had not have had their voting rights
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a book by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. The book discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States. Michelle Alexander (2010) argues that despite the old Jim Crow is death, does not necessarily means the end of racial caste (p.21). In her book “The New Jim Crow”, Alexander describes a set of practices and social discourses that serve to maintain African American people controlled by institutions. In this book her analyses is centered in examining the mass incarceration phenomenon in recent years. Comparing Jim Crow with mass incarceration she points out that mass incarceration is a network of laws, policies, customs and institutions that works together –almost invisible– to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined by race, African American (p. 178 -190).
CNN presents the documentary, Homicide in Hollenbeck, spotlighting gang activity in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Hollenbeck. This documentary explores the subculture of gangs existing within Hollenbeck from a several perspectives. The people documented include a mother who lost both of her sons to gang violence, a priest that has tried to help rehabilitate gang members, a police officer that has worked in Hollenbeck for five years in the gang unit, and a current gang member. For a conclusion, Homicide in Hollenbeck focuses on a juvenile exposed to gang life on the cusp of decided where they want their life to lead; gangs or freedom. Problems attributed to the high rate of gang activity and number of gangs in Hollenbeck are the high poverty rate, low employment rate, and broken families that make up the majority of Hollenbeck. The crime most discussed, as per the title of the documentary, is homicide The number of gang related homicides has risen even though the criminal behavior of gangs has ultimately decreased in the neighborhood. In order to fight the overwhelming gang presence, the police believe in increasing the amount of gun power on the streets and number of jailed gang members. The priest who runs Homeboy Industries stated that he feels most gang members are just young men who can’t get out of the gang life. With more funds and opportunities, he thinks the problem could be decreased. In the end, the documentary mentions that the FBI has formed a gang center where local law enforcement agencies can share information to gain more knowledge and to better fight the presence of gangs.
Today, more African American adults are under correctional control than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began (Alexander 180). Throughout history, there have been multiple racial caste systems in the United States. In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander defines a “racial caste” as “a racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom” (12). Alexander argues that both Jim Crow and slavery functioned as racial caste systems, and that our current system of mass incarceration functions as a similar caste system, which she labels “The New Jim Crow”. There is now a silent Jim Crow in our nation. Mass incarceration today serves the same function as did slavery before the Civil War and Jim Crow laws after the Civil War - to uphold a racial caste system.
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.
Many other ordeals lead to the increase in mass incarceration that we have in our criminal justice system today. It is the most damaging thing to do to the black community. It is viewed as a “backlash against the civil rights movement”. When I saw the increase in incarceration in the United States, I was shocked. The rate went from 300,000 to 2 million....
“Today we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world,” (Stevenson). The prison population in the U.S. has grown extremely fast over the past three decades. With almost “six million people on probation or parole,” it is clear that there is a problem with our prison system (Stevenson). I believe the prison system in the United States is outdated and unjust because of unfair sentencing, racial discrimination, and the privation of the prison system.
“Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again and that’s what they become” (Adichie, 2014). Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding. Forman’s critique of the Jim Crow Analogy appropriately depicts the danger of a single story. While I agree with most of Michelle Alexander’s submission regarding mass incarceration, reading Forman’s critiques about Jim Crow analogy provided a wider horizon and a far more realistic potential at stopping the incalculable damage mass incarceration has inflicted on the US community. I found the following Forman’s critiques as his strongest and most valid arguments:
In a remarkable analysis, Alexander (2010) made a fascinating comparisons of the modern struggles of blacks to dating back to the Jim Crow era. Alexander asserts that mass incarceration of African Americans is the “New Jim Crow” because it serves many of the same purposes of slavery over 100 years ago. Such disparity has not been changed as more and more African American men are under some sort of government supervision which are either incarcerated, awaiting trial, on probation or parole than slaves in 1850. For instance, the imprisonment of one in nine black men in 2006, demonstrates that black men were eight times more likely to be in jail or prison than their counterparts. Today’s colorblindness has used “police, prosecutors,
Drawing upon Lily Song’s scholarship when she states, “…race appears a secondary issue that may have cultural and political significance but is essentially a divisive mechanism that stymies the redistributive agendas or economic programs of class-based movements (Song p. 156).” To expound on this point, black and brown communities have been placed at an economic disadvantage connected to racialized discriminatory practices that have created hyper-segregated spaces with momentous challenges. Therefore, using a ‘one size fits all’ model to combat the crises within these spaces is not practical because it ignores the explicit role that race has played in the subjugation of communities of color. For example, taking a neo-pragmatic approach to eradicating these challenges by utilizing black and brown urban planners who have a greater understanding of the racial implications faced by these disadvantaged groups is a more sensible way to avoid trivializing the historical inequalities faced by people of color. To expand further, Rashad Shabazz details how black masculinity is specifically performed through prison and carceral spaces separate from how white masculinity is executed (Shabazz). Instead of approaching the problems faced by black males that present masculinity through a lens of white masculinity, a deeper analysis could connect how prison culture and the
In American society, race, class, and incarceration play a huge role in privatized corporations and in the lives of Americans. Our country has a tendency of using a person’s appearance and class to its own advantage. The U.S claims to incarcerate the vast amounts of inmates it does in order to protect its citizens but there is more that happens inside the doors of prisons. In this essay, I will argue that the United States profiteers within the prisons, selfishly uses the prison industrial complex to their advantage, and lastly, how race and class effect prisons.
Throughout the history of the United States, gangs have always been groups that regularly use threats to commit crimes. Crime rates escalated during the 1960s and 1970s, partly because of the large number of teenagers involved in crime. During the 1980s, juvenile crime continued to rise even though particular types of crime fell. But according to most reports, “gang activity declined somewhat in the 1990s. Experts attribute the decline to a combination of factors, including an improved economy, a decline in crack cocaine use, stricter law enforcement and more violence-prevention programs” (Teen Gangs). Statistics show that the number of gang members dropped to “780,000 in 1998 from 846,000 in 1996, according to the OJJDP” (Teen Gangs). Another report coming from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that “the proportion of high-school students who reported carrying a weapon during the past 30 days declined to 18% in 1997, from 26% in 1991” (Teen Gangs). Various people come to believe that membership in a gang is a severe dan...
To first start things off the United States has five percent of the world’s population, but have over twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. To me the numbers for that just doesn’t add up. From 1972 to the 2000’s the prison population has skyrocket. Imprisoning many people that have been found to be incident. All because the government sees and try to make society see people of color as animals that should be locked away. The government might as well say, “ No, they don’t need help just lock them away and that should work. And while we are at it when they are finally realised we are going to make in impossible for them to get a job and no voting rights”. Making it even harder for a person of color to adopt and more likely to return to prison. More than fifty-two of released inmates return to prison according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. All because of the image the government and social media plays on African American and other races. These is something that we can see althrought history. From African Americans being called “super predators” ,“danger to society”, and “monsters” all because the government needed the world to fear blacks and if they in fear they can have a reason for the acts of imprisoning so many African
This paper will use various books, journals, and videos to highlight its effect on society. In his book Death of a Negro, Delridge Hunter a professor at Medgar Evers College from 1977-present ,and past director of COSEP Cornell University 1970-1977, gives a view point of the African American that few people have explored. His book covers everything from music to movements. This book is relevant to my topic in that according to him Europe was the place that was chosen to “make the distinction between equals.” Whereby, they occupy the dominant, most favored position, or as in chess, the White position in which it explains how the dominant group that dominates the most valued position has controlled and manipulated various aspects of our society. Moving forward to Michelle’s Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow Laws, Michelle Alexander A longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, who now holds a joint appointment at the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University, Alexander's main hypothesis, from which the book gets its name, is that "mass incarceration is, symbolically, the New Jim Crow." . This is relevant to my topic in that even though we minorities have made tremendous contributions to this world we are still looked down upon and still considered to be inferior. In Michelle Alexander’s book
In the 1990s two of the main contributors were drugs and poverty. Today, the trend is similar. However, today’s crime rate also correlate with the well-televised police
She notes, “Challenging mass incarceration requires something civil rights advocates have long been reluctant to do: advocacy on behalf of criminals. Even at the height of Jim Crow segregation—when black men were more likely to be lynched than to receive a fair trial in the South—NAACP lawyers were reluctant to advocate on behalf of blacks accused of crimes unless the lawyers were convinced of the men’s innocence”1. Alexander rightly argues that if this bias in advocacy is allowed to persist, the injustices and oppression that are perpetuated in the name of “fighting crime” cannot be resisted in a meaningful way. “Criminals, it turns out, are the one social group in America we have permission to hate. In ‘colorblind’ America, criminals are the new whipping boys. They are entitled to no respect and little moral concern”1. Advocates who would fight against mass incarceration must be willing to openly show respect and concern for the people who have been caged, literally and metaphorically, as