Michelle Alexander 's The New Jim Crow Essay

In her novel "The New Jim Crow" (2010), Michelle Alexander claims that upon release, convicted felons are placed in a no-win situation set up by our government. According to Alexander, most prisoners "aside from figuring out where to sleep, nothing is more worrisome for people leaving prison than figuring out where to work," leaving little to no chance those who want to sustain a living.

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

The third critical book review for this class takes a look at “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander published in 2012 by the New York Press. This book analyzes the problem with the incarceration system in the United States today that unfairly affects the African American community. This incarceration system is continuing to separate families, strip men of their freedom, and effectually make them into second class citizens upon release from prison as “free” men. She even describes that those who are convicted of these crimes are “relegated to a racially segregated and subordinated existence” (Pg. 4). Michelle Alexander is not only a published author but is also an active Civil Rights activist all while currently employed as an associate professor of law at Ohio State University. It is a very interesting read that coincides with where our class discussions have recently been. It argues that we as a country have not ended racial discrimination but just transformed it into a new type of caste system. It is an eye opening book that created an uncomfortable feeling while reading due to my level of ignorance on this topic prior to taking this class. I believe that this book will serve as an important narrative into fixing the race problems in this country because it brings to light what needs to be fixed. If any progress is made it will be because of books like this that expose the problems but starting to fix them will be the next step.

According to Alexander’s statements in “The New Jim Crow”, the institutional racism persists. And that is in fact very true, as we can see it in racial profiling today. People, mostly people of color are victims of racial profiling every day. We rely on the police to protect us from any sort of danger, but racial profiling has led many people to live in fear. Racial profiling is patently illegal, and is breaking the U.S constitution, but it is still present, mainly in the small towns and states. People of color are generally just stopped by the police and undergo a series of humiliating and degrading interrogations, detentions, and searches, without any criminal evidence. Just as in Alexander’s book, she illustrates how racial profiling erodes the fourth amendment, and this includes: “Voluntary Cooperation,” stop-and-frisk, and pretext stops.

Throughout history Black men have been accustomed to being profiled, interrogated harassed by whites, and accused of accusations. Racial profiling has been a major component of America’s History. History has repeated itself and Black men are still facing the same limitations as they ancestors experienced. Lynching’s and accusations was a historic experience for blacks in the 1940’s. Today, we see Blacks arrested and incarcerated at higher rates then any other racial group. As Michelle Alexander research demonstrates incarcerating blacks is our “New Jim Crow”.

The New Jim Crow is a book that discusses how legal practices and the American justice system are harming the African American community as a whole, and it argues that racism, though hidden, is still alive and well in our society because of these practices. In the book, Michelle Alexander, author and legal scholar, argues that legal policies against offenders have kept and continue to keep black men from becoming first class citizens, and she writes that by labeling them as “criminals,” the justice system and society in general is able to act with prejudice against them and subordinate black Americans who were previously incarcerated, on probation, or on parole, by limiting their access to services as a result of their ‘criminal status’ and therefore, further degrading their quality of life. The New Jim Crow urges readers to acknowledge the injustice and racial disparity of our criminal justice system so that this new, more covert form of racism in society can be stopped.

The issue is that we incarcerate too many people. “The US incarcerates people at the highest rate, too: 707 out of every 100,000 residents (International Centre for Prison Studies 2014a)”. Now let’s compare that to other countries, “The average incarceration rate across Europe is a comparatively paltry 140 out of 100,000 residents, with the rate of incarceration in 19 countries (including Austria, the Republic of Ireland, Switzerland, and Germany) in only the double digits… According to official reports, there are 530,000 more people in American prisons than in Chinese ones, despite the fact that China has roughly a billion more residents” (Skarbek, David. 2014, Prisonomics: Lessons from America's Mass Incarceration. Economic Affairs, 34:

A major issue that has been at the forefront of the topic of race in America is racial profiling. This practice of targeting individuals based on the individual’s race is not new and has been in use for many many years. However it has recently come to national attention with the killing of unarmed black teenagers by police officers. The issue of racial profiling not only highlights the lack of equality in America but the issue of policemen using excessive force when dealing with criminal activity.

In today’s modern world, many people would be surprised to find out that there is still a racial caste system in America. After witnessing the election of a black president, people have started believing that America has entered a post-racial society. This is both a patently false and dangerous mindset. The segregation and stigma of race is still very much alive in our society. Instead of a formalized institution such as slavery or Jim Crow, America has found a new way to continue the marginalization of blacks by using the criminal justice system. In Michelle Alexander’s book “ The New Jim Crow”, she shows how America’s “ War on Drugs “ has become a tool of racial segregation and how the discretionary enforcement of drug laws has

The United States incarcerates more of its people than any other country in the world. Even though it makes up for 5% of the world’s population, it also makes up for 25% of all of the world’s prisoners, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies. The US has been ranked number one in a ranking of 221 countries who incarcerate the most out of every 100,000 of the national population. Out of every 100,000 Americans, 707 are incarcerated. That’s 10 times as many people as Norway, 15 times as Iceland, and 14 times as Japan. The United Sates prison system focuses on punishment rather than rehabilitation, which causes the recidivism rates to be extremely high. It has one of the highest rates in the world at a 76.6%, compared to Norway at the lowest rate of 20%. The system is so focused on punishing these individuals that it forgets they will one day go back into society.

The article expresses that racial profiling is one of the most serious, enduring, and divisive human rights violations in the United States. April Walker has gone more into detail about racial profiling. Also stating that social and economic progress of African-Americans over the past fifty years, Americans continue to live in a country where racial inequity is the norm and it affects the progression of Black-Americans in the United States (Walker, 2011). The dominant belief about Blacks, upon which their legal rights, or lack of, were historically constructed, was the belief in their ontological inferiority. (Walker, 2011) . In traditional Americanism, Black-American people are perceived as poor, lazy, lustful, ignorant, and prone to criminal behavior. (Walker, 2011). April Walker also expresses multiple incidences that minorities were the victims of brutal attacks. Walker further goes into if race or religion or ethnicity increase the chance of becoming a victim,

The United States is made up of five percent of the world's population, but is comprised of about a quarter of the worlds incarcerated. Approximately twenty percent of the newly incarcerated yearly have violated parole and great majorities are non-violent offenders. In “U.S. Prison Population Dwarfs that of Other Nations,” Adam Liptak states “The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London.”

The United States has 324 million citizens, and more than 2 million of them are incarcerated (Rabuy, 2016); China has a seventh of the world’s population- and with 1.357 billion inhabitants (China population, 2017), you would think their prison system would proportionately mimic that of the United States; however, it is quite the contrary, and the United States has half a million more inmates (Prison population total, 2017)! But how does America measure up on a global scale? The United States makes up a mere 5% of the world’s population, but accounts for 25% of the world’s imprisoned (Liptak, 2008); and with one of the highest recidivism rates in the world, it is not difficult to see

The prison system in America is undoubtedly the largest in the world, claiming the freedom of roughly four hundred and eighty six for every one hundred thousand Americans, on average. (Federal Bureau of Justice Consensus) The amount of inmates rises annually. At last consensus, midyear 2005, there were 2,320,359

According to Professor Joan Petersilia’s 2011 paper, published by the National Institute of Justice, the United States now has the highest incarceration rate of any free nation. As a proportion of its population, the United States incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany, and 12 times more than Japan. Starting in the 1970s through the 2000s, the number of Unites States citizens serving prison terms was on the rise. This was likely a result of stiffer penalties implemented by lawmakers due to the increased crime rates in the 1960s. (Lopez, 2016) This trend of more and longer incarcerations continued through the 2000s even though the crime rate began to drop in the 1990s. The United States is now turning from longer prison terms to rehabilitation as a means of crime