The criminal justice system is the gateway into the larger system of stigmatization and marginalization. She knows her book will meet with skepticism, especially about the term “caste.” She explains that it “ a stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom” (12). However, there is no broader movement and the tendency is to treat the criminal justice system like any other institution with lingering racial issues.Īlexander’s main point is that this is the New Jim Crow and that our rhetoric of “colorblindness” disguises the reality of a new racial caste system. The NAACP has made some progress: racial profiling has come under attack in recent years. Civil rights advocates are mostly devoted to other issues such as affirmative action. In 1972 less than 350,000 people were held in prisons and jails today it is 2 million.Ĭurrently, one in three young African American men will spend time in prison in some cities, more than half of them are incarcerated, on parole, or on probation. This is strange given the fact that in the 1970s many were convinced prisons were going to become obsolete soon. There is also not much of a correlation between crime and punishment sociologists point out that governments decide what they want to punish regardless of crime rates.Īmerica’s penal system is one of “social control unparalleled in world history” (8). This rate is disproportionate in terms of race while people of all colors use and sell at the same rate, blacks are imprisoned at rates twenty to fifty times higher than those for whites. While the War on Drugs actually began with a declining rate of illegal drug use, it resulted in a rate of incarceration higher than anywhere else in the world. This did not bear out exactly as stated, but the guerilla armies that the CIA supported in Nicaragua did bring in drugs to inner-city neighborhoods. Afterward, the media was filled with images and stories of “crack babies” and “crack whores.” Some in the black community thought the War on Drugs was part of a government plan to facilitate the genocide of black people.
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Most people think the War on Drugs was launched as a response to the crack cocaine crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, but Reagan actually announced it before crack became a media issue. The formerly incarcerated are “relegated to a racially segregated and subordinated existence” (4). After she left though, she was convinced it was more than that. She did not see a new racial caste system, and when she started her job at the ACLU she recognized that there was racial bias in the criminal justice system but that was the extent of it. She was elated with Obama’s election and saw Jim Crow as something of the past. They are subject to discrimination in many ways – housing, employment, voting, food stamps, jury service – which brings us to a situation very much like the old Jim Crow.Īlexander explains how she came to write this book.
America saw disenfranchising black men as essential to the original union today many are still not able to vote because of their status as a felon. Cotton cannot vote either because he has been disenfranchised as a felon. Jarvis Cotton’s great-grandfather, grandfather, and father could not vote due to Klan violence and poll taxes.