African Americans in Prison and the Jim Crow Laws Essay

Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, examines mass incarceration in the United States, why the criminal justice system works the way it does towards minorities, the detriments associated with mass incarceration as it relates to offenders, and much more. In the introduction of her book, Alexander immediately paints the harsh reality of mass incarceration with the story of Jarvious Cotton who is denied the right to vote among other rights because he, “has been labeled as a felon and is currently on parole” (1). Other information Alexander presents in her introduction are her qualifications as an author of the book, and gives a brief summary of each chapter and how each one is laid out. Her qualifications are she is African-American civil rights attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and is also an Associate Professor at the University of Stanford Law School. From a critical standpoint, Alexander seems very qualified to write on the topic, being part of the marginalized group and also being an expert in the legal field of which the topic covers, enhances her ethos to where one could consider her an expert in mass incarceration topics, as they relate to African-Americans. Overall, the introduction of her book does a great job starting out giving a stark reality of topic at hand, giving brief statistical references about mass incarceration in the United States, and giving an outline for her book.

“Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.”(Lyndon Johnson). For generations in the United Stated, ethnic minorities have been discriminated against and denied fair opportunity and equal rights. In the beginning there was slavery, and thereafter came an era of racism which directly impacted millions of minorities lives. This period called Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system up in till mid 1960s. Jim Crow was more than just a series of severe anti-Black laws, it became a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were positioned to the status of second class citizens. What Jim Crow

Racism in the United States has not remained the same over time since its creation. Racism has shifted, changed, and shaped into unrecognizable ways that fit into the fabric of the American society to render it nearly invisible to the majority of Americans. Michelle Alexander, in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness shatters this dominantly held belief. The New Jim Crow makes a reader profoundly question whether the high rates of incarceration in the United States is an attempt to maintain blacks as an underclass. Michelle Alexander makes the assertion that “[w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it” using the criminal justice system and colorblind rhetoric. (Alexander 2). The result is a population of Black and Latino men who face barriers and deprivation of rights as did Blacks during the Jim Crow era. Therefore, mass incarceration has become the new Jim Crow.

The trend of African American males between the ages of 25 and 29 has seen a dramatic increase of incarceration. Attention has been focusing on areas of housing, education, and healthcare but the most prominent problem for African American males is the increase in the incarceration rate. African American males between the ages of 25 and 29 incarceration rate has been thought, by many, to be caused by economic factors such as under employment or unemployment, poor housing, lack of education, and lack of healthcare. Yet, others believe it is due to the imbalance of minorities within the criminal justice system, such as judges, lawyers, and lawmakers.

In this book The New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander gives a look at history racism of African-Americans in relations to slavery and brings us to into modern day racism. Not racism as a form of calling people names or by the means of segregation which would be considered overt racism condemned by society but by colorblindness and by a racial caste system. Alexander argues African-Americans are being discriminated against in the form of mass incarceration. “Mass incarceration refers not only to the criminal justice system but also to the larger web of laws, rules, polices, and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison” (Alexander 2012, pg 14). Upon reading The New Jim Crow I believe African –

The first article I am going to focus on, Foreword: Addressing the Real World of Racial Injustice in the Criminal Justice System, was written by Donna Coker . Primarily, the article talks about the statistical evidence of in justice regarding racial profiling in policing and imprisonment. Official incarceration data speaks for itself when it shows that although African Americans make up twelve percent of the U.S. population, they make up of almost half of the population incarcerated for crimes (Coker, 2003). Researchers with the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimate that twenty-eight percent of African Americans will be imprisoned at one point in their life (Coker, 2003). A study conducted by the Sentencing Project reports that nearly one in three African American men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine are under the supervision of the criminal justice system on any given day (Coker

American has a legacy of the mistreatment and disenfranchisement of African Americans. The same bad treatment that many think only took place in the past is in fact still intact, it’s just presented in a new way. The mass incarceration of blacks in the Unites States can be attributed to the “racial hierarchy” that has always existed. The U.S contributes to about 5% of the worlds overall population, and about 25% of the worlds prison population (Holland 1), “if those rates reflected jail, probation and parole populations, the numbers would rise exponentially”(Griffith 9). Statics show that there is a chance that about 1 in 3 black males are expected end up in prison (Jacobson). Although, in terms of the entire United States population African Americans only make up about 13% (Prison Activist Resource Center. Racism Fact Sheets: “ Latinos and the Criminal Injustice System.” 2003). There is a huge number of African Americans involved in the criminal justice system in some way. The average person does not know about mass incarceration nor about the racism that is in just about every part of the criminal justice system. When most people think about racism their thoughts often drift to slavery or Jim Crow laws, but for most, they do not consider how the amount of African Americans in prison today could be due to bias or racism. A significant cause of mass incarceration is the same racism that produced the Jim Crow era.

Our past is full of cases that represent the inequality of the criminal justice system. In the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of Plessy V Ferguson, in 1896 the court upheld racial segregation and made the separate but equal the standard doctrine of the United States until 1954, when the Supreme Court handed down the decision in Brown v Board of Education which made the racial segregation illegal and highlighted the protections offered in the fourteenth amendment as it relates to equal protection. Despite the 14th Amendment 's promise of life and liberty under the law, this group of Americans found themselves subject to another law, known as the "Jim Crow Laws." These were a group of laws passed primarily in the southern states during reconstruction and lasting until around 1965, were established to make sure that the whites were treated differently than the blacks, in everyday life, including the criminal justice system. Even though the Jim Crow era has passed by, we unfortunately have come to the conclusion that we have just entered a new era of Jim Crow. “We are arguably no longer under Jim Crow or de jure discrimination; however, unfortunately and regrettably, we are presently realizing manifest de facto discrimination, or the new Jim Crow” (Durrant, 2015). Statistics show that over 40 percent of students who are expelled from school today are African American and over 70 percent of students who are referred to law enforcement for criminal activity are

As one can see, mass incarceration of African Americans is clearly an injustice that needs to be acknowledged and resolved. In my Social and Economic Justice course, several theorists were discussed about what they considered justice and their methods to reach it. In the following paragraphs, I examine Rawls’, Nozick’s, and Mill’s theories in context with the mass incarceration of African American and explain why their proposed solutions would not be applicable to this injustice. Rawls’ theory consists of imagining oneself in what he calls the Original Position, in which we are all self-interested rational people that stand behind the “Veil of Ignorance. By this, it means that people are motivated to select, in an informed and enlightened way whatever seems most beneficial for themselves. However, due to the Veil of Ignorance we do not know certain things such as our race, age, sex, social class, or physical/mental disabilities; we just are aware of the different scenarios that humans could possible face and the facts of humanity. Rawls believes that by having self-interested rational individuals, masked by the Veil of Ignorance, it would create a fair procedure in which fair principles would be chosen in order to govern the world. With this in mind, Rawls argues that these individuals would choose two principles, Principle of Equal Liberty and Difference Principle, to structure society in the real world. The Principle of Equal Liberty states that each person has an equal

Throughout the early 1960s, African American people living in the United States were greatly oppressed. Slavery and Jim Crow laws, which justified segregation, were abolished; however, African Americans did not receive equal treatment, as the ideology of white supremacy, or Caucasians being the superior race, remained in tact. Since juries typically consisted of Caucasian males who favored other Caucasians, African Americans rarely received fair trials. Other factors, such as housing opportunities, were unequal for African Americans as well, and as a result, poorer districts consisting solely of African Americans formed. Since African Americans were strictly segregated from Caucasians and therefore did not receive similar opportunities, the ideology that African Americans were inferior to Caucasians became hegemonic, meaning that the belief that African Americans had fewer rights than Caucasians was simply accepted in society without question. Though laws and regulations guaranteed equality among all races, African Americans remained oppressed; therefore, groups like the Black Panther Party began to fight this hegemonic ideology. Their violent and nonviolent protests were considered counter-hegemonic, as they hoped to diminish the unfair and inaccurate ideologies that had existed and essentially become common sense within society. In the “Black Panther Platform,” the Black Panther Party details their reasons for participating in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, a

The goal of this archival research study is to identify the deep rooted prejudice and racism that has been perpetuated in our criminal justice system since it was created. Our justice system creates an unfair racial hierarchy that has and continues to criminalize African Americans due to the color of their skin. I will be analyzing the Reagan administration, the War on Drugs, corrupt police practices, media, and sentencing in order to reveal if racism and unfair treatment of African Americans in the criminal justice system is in fact occurring.

In the book The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, she highlights one of many problems that plague our legal system here in the U.S. “Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind (Alexander, 2).” She argues that even though the U.S. got rid of the Jim Crow Laws back along with slavery, does not mean we have solved the problem of racism. In the

Thesis: Historical hostility and the bias social and criminal justice system against the Black minority has been a major cause of obstacle in achieving a social status in United States.

The population of young African-American prisoners incarcerated in state prisons is five times more than whites (Nellis,14). In 2014, the average rate of black male prisoners was 1,408 per 100,000 population, and as of 2017 there has been no sign that this rate is decreasing. This group of young black men comes mostly from poor backgrounds where there is limited education, unstable family systems, and often an exposure to violence. Thus, they are more likely to commit various types of crimes. Moreover, “[black males] are incarcerated not solely because of their crime, but also because of racially disparate policies, beliefs, and practices, rendering these collateral consequences all the more troubling” (Nellis,3). Living behind bars is difficult for all individuals, but it is even worse for black prisoners since they receive condemnation from the outside world and also unfair treatment inside prisons. Because there is no privacy in prisons, inmates eat, sleep, work and follow orders from not only the authorities but also from other dominant inmates. In order to survive behind bars, black male prisoners establish their own subculture, which is based on such features as hierarchy, language, behavior, and role of race. Prison subculture is a reality that is little known by the general public, and even the government and criminal justice authorities have only a meager knowledge of it. This research is an exploration of prison subculture, which consists of a particular language

African American has been through serious events throughout the decades, even now there is still racism between races sadly. The Jim Crows Laws were created in 1876, it was created after the Civil War. The Jim Crow Laws were extreme and horrible, they would separate the blacks from whites from basically everything you can think of. They would have signs saying white or colored, this applied to all colored young and old, doesn’t matter what age. Only their skin color would affect how they were treated, the lighter the skin the better it was to them, back then it didn’t matter how you were as a person but how you look like which is pretty terrifying to think about.