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African Americans During The Civil War Essay

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Disparities of race, class, gender, and age have produced extraordinary rates of incarceration among young African American men with little schooling. Radical changes in crime control and sentencing polices led to an unprecedented buildup of the United States prison population over the last thirty years. African Americans comprise a disproportionate percentage of the individuals imprisoned in State correctional institutions across the United States. . There are 5 main reasons as to why African Americans repeatedly go to prison. These reasons are racial discrimination, the war on drugs, traffic stops, unemployment, and wage trajectory. By looking at the history of Black African Americans we can further understand why they continue to remain incarcerated all over the United States. After 1865, southern states passed a series of laws called “Black Codes which are codes that control and limit the newly freed slaves’ right to be free from human bondage” (Stewart 1998). The Black codes were designed to maintain some elements of slavery after the Civil War (1888). The South had benefited from free slave labor, but after the Civil War, this readily available labor pool diminished. Thus, plantation owners sought state and local governmental officials to promulgate legislation and ordinances that would again bind African American plantations. Our present legal system especially the criminal justice system has remnants of the Black Codes in state federal laws (1998).
The federal

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