Many algorithms are fiercely guarded corporate secrets. What a surprise this book was. If it was hard enough before being labelled a criminal, think how hard it is after.A must-read for anyone who is serious about understanding the current state of law, order and justice.I've worked in the violence prevention sector for 12 years now, and I've recently started learning about the prison industrial complex. I can’t recall anything about the paper, either, though I can still see the “This Is Your Brain On Drugs” commercial that was rolled out in 1987 by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. I mostly want to mind my own business. The history of slavery and of Jim Crow is a stain that marks the entire sweep of US history – and that stain is red, because it is in blood.The New Jim Crow is essential reading for Americans who don't or haven't followed these issues closely over the last 30 years. With dazzling candor, Alexander argues that we all pay the cost of the new Jim Crow.” —“A powerful analysis of why and how mass incarceration is happening in America, “With imprisonment now the principal instrument of our social policy directed toward poorly educated black men, Michelle Alexander argues persuasively that the huge racial disparity of punishment in America is not the mere result of neutral state action.
In quiet yet forceful writing Alexander, a legal scholar, outlines how the Reagan government exploited 1980s hysteria over crack cocaine to demonise the black population so that “black” and “crime” became interchangeable. Being black in America = having less opportunities and resources. Washington D. C. was embroiled in the Iran-Contra Affair.
. But hopefully we can now see that Jim Crow was a less restrictive form of racial and social control, not a real alternative to racial caste systems.
Supreme Court Judge Robert Jackson said in 1940: Federal Laws are so voluminous and unfathomable that prosecutors can easily pick the man and find the crime rather than vice versa. Who can you turn to when you'll be arrested just for hanging out in your home area, with your previous associates, or as they are often otherwise known, friends and family?
Start by marking “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” as Want to Read: There are no problems harder to solve then sociological ones. n 2008, months before his election as president, Barack Obama assailed feckless black fathers who had reneged on responsibilities that ought not “to end at conception”. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that the war on drugs and its consequent incarceration of a disproportionate number of black American men amounts to a new form of racialized social control akin to the Jim Crow laws. As someone who focuses on systems of oppression, I tend to self-righteously roll my eyes when other white people are "shocked" at blatant cases of discrimination or violence in their community.I have included gobs of this book in status updates and other quotes so will probably not do my usual inclusion of material from the text within this review. Du BoisIf you aren’t familiar with how America has expressed its racism institutionally since the demise of slavery and the repeal of the overtly racist Jim Crowe laws, you might want to read this book.
How can you make money, yet stay out of trouble, when government agencies seem to be trying their hardest to make things difficult. While those laws may have looked good on paper, they were passed within a political climate that was overwhelmingly hostile and punitive toward poor people and people of color, resulting in a prison-building boom, an increase in racial and class disparities in sentencing, and a quintupling of the incarcerated population.Fortunately, a growing number of advocates are organizing to ensure that important reforms, such as ending cash bail, are not replaced with systems that view poor people and people of color as little more than commodities to be bought, sold, evaluated and managed for profit. “...the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs” ~W.E.B. But let me say first that I was immediately captivated by this book and soon adopted the feeling of some other reviewers that everyone should read and take this book to heart.