The New Jim Crow Summary

“The New Jim Crow” has made an impact on my viewpoint on the incarceration systems in the United States. Michelle Alexander spreads her thoughts on how the United States should relook the way incarceration systems are ran. She holds a strong belief that these systems are ran the wrong way and she believes that racism exists in some of these arrests. Michelle had to learn the hard way though, through her own personal experiences. Her son Damien was an honors student and a star athlete at his high school and he was given a scholarship to attend Syracuse University. Damien was brought into court in chains from an Illinois prison for being involved with drug use and thankfully was sent to boot camp for 4 months, instead of the original 30 years …show more content…
The United States has gone through two rough phases that discriminate against minorities, especially black people. The first phase that we went through was slavery, and the next phase that we went through were the Jim Crow laws. Michelle Alexander lets us the reader know that a new phase has been going on for years now. This phase is called the mass incarceration phase, which questions if African Americans are being discriminated against in the prison systems. The incarceration system is unfair on all levels and discriminates black people at all aspects. Police officers, prosecution systems and the Supreme Court all discriminate against African Americans. The biggest mistake the United States made was when we decided to go to war against drugs. We decided to investigate on drugs and decided to jail people who used drugs to help “save” America. The war on drugs may be the dumbest “problem” we think we have in the United States. The sinister genius of the drug war is that, unlike the earlier systems, it’s not explicitly race-predicated. On their face, the laws against drug use and trafficking apply to everyone regardless of color. But in practice, there’s an immensely colossal racial disparity. Although surveys have shown that all ethnic groups use drugs at about the same rate, the drug laws are and always have been enforced overwhelmingly against people of color. Alexander argues persuasively that this isn’t a contingency; it was intentional on the component of the people who orchestrated and instituted

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