The New Jim Crow By Michelle Alexander

Michelle Alexander’s New York Times Bestseller book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a book of many controversies. Alexander forms a complex argument of she considers mass incarceration to be the new Jim Crow. She makes interesting arguments on how and why mass incarceration of African Americans is like, the laws and policies dating back to slavery as well as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the Jim Crow eras. She explores the ways in which the government continue to keep African Americans at the bottom of a racial caste.

Michelle Alexander is a professor at the Union Theological Seminary,a civil rights lawyer and advocate and writer that devotes herself to speaking out on racial injustice and that slavery hasn't actually left america or in Alexander’s words, “we have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.” Alexander's book touches a lot of subjects that have to do with America's criminal justice system, such as criticizing past President Richard Nixon's “the war on drugs”, she explains that because of this event our country has lead to mass incarceration, of those being arrested with usually black americans. Thus we have this crucial issue with racial injustice and denying our citizens basic human right by holding them in jail cells

Immediately after the start of the book Alexander touches on the diminished rights that prisoners are left with after serving their time, and how these conditions are equal or even worse than those who lived at the height of Jim Crow laws. At the end of this section she goes on to state “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”(2) This is the first sighting of Alexander’s thesis within the book, and the average reader will be shocked by this statement due to how invisible the effects of the criminal justice system really are. No history book or public news station has ever made the correlation between the discriminatory policies in effect throughout the United States and how it quietly creates a new caste system. In a world where a black man is president, and the matter of racial discrimination seems to be easing away, it just doesn’t seem possible for something this big to happen under our noses. For this reason, the audience is surprised and now interested in the matter, which allows her to begin introducing her

The antebellum period’s perception of Blacks in the United States has continued to have profound effects to this day. There is a perceived liberation of Blacks which is misinformed by the accession of Blacks into higher political positions (e.g. President Obama), which many objective scholars view as misplaced. Michelle Alexander states that law enforcement has become one of the many new conduits of suppression for African-Americans. Most crimes by Blacks are from purposeful setups. This is exemplified by a large number of African-American males in correctional facilities today, as well as the wanton brutality on people of color by law enforcement. Discrimination continues against Blacks. It only changes form.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness written by Michelle Alexander, presents the evidence of mass incarceration as a racial caste system. Alexander indicated that in the prison system, it is legal to discriminate against criminals practically in similar ways it was legal to discriminate against African Americans in the past. After being characterized as a felon, the previous ways of discrimination become legal, such as being denied numerous rights and are relegated to second-class status for the rest of their lives, permanently losing their right to vote, all the while, legally being denied work and not being able to engage in social programs in order to recover and restore what they have lost while in prison. In

Michelle Alexander is a highly celebrated civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar. In her book, The New Jim Crow: Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander discusses the legal systems that seem to be doing their jobs perfectly well but have in fact just replaced one racial caste system with a new one. Cornel West called her book the “Secular Bible of a new social movement.” In 2011, the NAACP gave her book the image award for best Nonfiction. In this book, she focuses on racial problems in the past as well as the present and argues that the problems are basically the same, if not worse. She uses examples as well as metaphors. Alexander’s research is beautifully done and is very motivating to read. She paints a devastating picture of the new Jim Crow and how it functions in the world we live in. She uses images that make you cringe but at the same time persuades you that it is in fact all true.

In Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander approaches the touchy subject of how although African Americans have gained many freedoms through the civil rights movement, they are still undermined in the ‘mass incarceration’ with the war on drugs. With this being said, it is often hard to remember how hard the African Americans had to fight for their civil rights when we constantly see riots of African Americans in the streets, and black Americans portrayed as drug dealers and ‘thugs’ in pop culture. On the other hand, you have people making jokes out of African Americans being poor fathers, not being around, and mothers having to raise children on their own living on welfare and food stamps.

The book Race, Incarceration, and American Values describes mass incarceration as essentially a legalized form of genocide that is slowly destroying the fiber of African American families and communities. It provides explanations for the origin of mass incarceration as well as the reasons for the disproportionate level of African Americans in the prison system. Glenn Loury, along with Pamela Karian, Tommie Shelby, and Loic Wacquant discuss how America has let fear and greed cause an inequitable landscape for citizens who have the misfortune of being born the wrong color and of the wrong social-economic class. The principals of equality and freedom on which America was founded has become nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Maybe the pride America displays to the World as a Global power incapable of wrong doing is what is holding it back from recognizing the mistakes it made and undergoing to process of change. Or, maybe it is what we fear most. It is what we know in our heads and hearts; but never dared to say. That it is a careful crafted system to keep those with power in power!

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander introduces the idea as to how the modern prison system is used to imprison the African American population in the United States. Alexander seems to believe that the ‘War on Drugs’ has replaced previous forms of racial systematic oppression in the United States, such as slavery and Jim Crow laws. Alexander believes that to amend this form of systematic oppression it is necessary to disregard colorblindness in prison reform and approach modern prison systems as a form of racial oppression and increase affirmative action policies. Even though Alexander makes a valid argument, her identity politic approach seems problematic and antithetical to ending systematic racism in the modern prison system.

In the article, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander vigorously argues the means in which the American prison system has become a redesigned form of disenfranchisement for poor people of color, while comparing it to the racially motivated Jim Crow laws. Alexander begins the article by making powerful assumptions about the readers; she states that “[racial caste] is [the subject] that most Americans seem content to ignore”. Although this may offend the readers, she includes a personal narrative explaining her initial disbelief to the “new racial caste system” and by doing so, Alexander displays how easily it is for one to deny controversial issues on race without proper knowledge on the subject. Moreover, the use of personal narrative makes

Historically, African American people have been criminalized by the powerful elite immediately after the emancipation proclamation was passed. The 13th Amendment stated that no man could be held as a slave unless he has committed a crime and was a prisoner. African Americans were arrested and imprisoned for low crimes like vagrancy and loitering. The system of convict leasing contributed to the arrests of freed slaves. Using this method of enslavement, prisoners would contract with private companies and states to use prisoner labor at low costs while maximizing the benefits. Prisoners were forced to work on farms, railroads, and highways to help the South gain economic control after the Civil War. Like slavery, the prisoners were rarely paid for their labor, they were not properly fed, and they did not have sustainable living conditions. African Americans were arrested at high numbers to accommodate this demand for labor (PUNISHMENT & CORRECTIONS TEXT BOOK). With this, came the notion that African Americans were criminals, and they were a part of the “dangerous class” that needed to be suppressed (Chaney, 2015). Dr. Cassandra Chaney (2015) examines the laws that labeled African Americans as permanent second-class citizens, known as Jim Crow Laws. These laws were in effect in the United States from 1865 to 1965, and they

Alexander is very specific in her book and does not use many generalization. The generalizations that are used throughout her book are careful in the sense that they cover only the material she needed to make her point to the audience. In her first chapter, Alexander tell the history of American slavery and Reconstruction Era, etc., which was generalized to help the readers understand where Michelle was coming from in her evidence that the Jim Crow still exists today. The fifth guideline is Expertise. Within her book, Michelle Alexander has stories from real people who have been through the process of the criminal justice system Jarvious Cotton and Drake are to name a couple. She also relies on the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who was imprisoned, for speaking out about the discrimination and leading the nation into Civil Rights Era. By reading, King’s words and learning about the system from those who have been in it and the hardships mass incarceration causes, Michelle Alexander can giver her readers first hand accounts of the negative effects that come from today’s discrimination. The last guideline from Baker, Anderson, and Dorn, is Objectivity. Michelle Alexander is objective for much of the book through the history and parallels of today’s Jim Crow and the original laws; however there were areas where she became subjective mainly when she was talking about her personal journey to realizing that Jim Crow has yet to

Mass incarceration and systemic oppression is hurting our society. Bryan Stevenson demonstrates mass incarceration in our generation by constantly stating the statistics. He said, “ Most of the hundred or so death row prisoners who had been sentenced to execution in Alabama since capital punishment was restored in 1975 were black, although to Walter’s surprise nearly 40 percent of them were white”(53). He continues to add the increase in prison population has been from less than 300,000 in 1972 to 2.3 million today(15). Through this facts, I was exposed to the deeper issues of inequality in the US. The poor and black are being marginalized and mistreated. Like historical slavery, numerous lawful and legal structures have the immediate effect of constraining the energy of African Americans and isolating out poor and minority populaces from whites. As Bryan states, “... Monroe County, who was 40 percent black, it was not uncommon for prosecutors to exclude all African American from jury service”(59). This stood out to me because now I am reading this from a person, who is witnessing the inequality personally and knows the ins and outs of the Justice System. This issues are not only on the News in which we watch one day and ignore it the second day. By laying the facts down, it's a wake-up call that the poor and marginalized are being mistreated. This mistreatments could be a response to fear. Meaning, the white community feels unsafe or threatened by the “uncivilized”

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness raises awareness on the American racial caste system, heavily due to the crisis of high imprisonment of black men. As a former director for ACLU’s Racial Justice Project, a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, and currently an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, Alexander appears informative on the issue, though she wasn’t always. Although Alexander is a black woman, she admits she didn’t consider a racial caste system existing in America until a decade ago. Thus, her objective for The New Jim Crow is to inform society of the racial caste system that effects hundreds of thousands of poor, ill-educated, black men, and concealed accounts that are similar to the suffering of their ancestors.

Just like slavery and the Jim Crow laws of the south, mass incarceration today is a new way to segregate African Americans it’s a way to create a new caste system in which African Americans are treated “second class citizens”, prevented from equality in racial, social and political rights. Michelle Alexander jumps into the equity framework and clarifies how a ton of practices and convictions from subjection times are quite recently marked diversely now. Alexander argues in her book The New Jim Crow that “A system of racial and social control” still exist against African Americans.