Mass Incarceration

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Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer presently serving as an associate professor of law at the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University. In Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, The New Press, 2010, she illustrates the devastating effects that mass incarceration in America has on blacks, especially black men. Alexander argues that the current mass incarceration of blacks is very similar to the past slavery system of blacks, and is very similar to the new Jim Crow era that followed it. Alexander further argues that “slavery has not ended for blacks, it has just been restructured” (p. 2). Alexander states that this current system of racial control permanently “locks blacks into a racial undercaste” (p. 12) of an inferior status …show more content…
Today, a significant number of black men in the United States are “subjected to legal discrimination just as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were” (p.2) in the past. Now, racial control of blacks is operated and maintained by our American criminal justice system, instead of slavery, the Klan, and Jim Crow. Innocent African-Americans, mainly the men, are targets of the police department to be stopped while traveling by vehicle or by foot, to be searched by the police hoping to find drugs on the men. The targeting of these African-Americans is done by an unfair concentration of high police activity in predominantly black neighborhoods, along with the unrealistic idea that blacks are criminals, especially drug criminals. Alexander states that, “ninety percent of the people imprisoned for drug offenses are black or Latino” (p. …show more content…
60). The “declaration of the War on Drugs by then President Ronald Reagan in 1982”, (p. 49) along with the assistance of the criminal justice system has helped to increase the number of blacks being arrested and jailed on drug charges. Police departments receive various types of federal aid, equipment, and incentives to fight the “War on Drugs”. “Millions of dollars in federal aid are offered to state and local law enforcement agencies willing to wage the war” (p. 73). Police arrest African-Americans who are then treated unequally in front of a judge as compared to whites. Blacks receive much harsher minimum sentences than whites, even for the same crimes. Most blacks plead guilty in order to receive less jail time, since much longer jail sentences are attached to drug crimes that blacks are charged with. “Almost no one goes to trial. Almost all criminal cases are resolved by plea bargaining, a guilty plea by the defendant in exchange for leniency by the prosecutor” (p. 87). After being arrested or jailed for drug charges, and now carrying a criminal label, blacks find they are unable to enjoy the same privileges that non-criminals enjoy. African-Americans have a hard time finding work and housing. African Americans are now legally denied government benefits such as food stamps, money for school, and public housing, as they can now be legally discriminated
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