Sirin writes that her article “investigates presidential progress in addressing racial injustices and disparities within the context of the war on drugs” and argues that the possibility for racial justice depends on a progressive president choosing its pursuit as a personal agenda. Sirin examines the drug policies of presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, and when discussing President Reagan, she gives him responsibility for the “punitive policies that disproportionately affected certain racial/ethnic groups” found in the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. She underscores his advocacy for federal mandatory minimum sentences, which created “the notorious 100 to 1 provision” under which five grams of crack cocaine carried the same prison sentence, five years, as 500 grams of powder cocaine. After explaining that crack cocaine users were typically poor and black, she notes that the resulting racial disparity in sentencing stayed in place until President Obama’s Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. Sirin clarifies that a progressive president will struggle without the legislature, judiciary, or public opinion, but she still holds that “most importantly, the president in office should have a progressive agenda to begin with in order to initiate and work towards key structural changes and policy reforms.” For this reason, according to her estimation, the president defines drug…
"An institution or reform movement that is not selfish, must originate in the recognition of some evil that is adding to the sum of human suffering, or diminishing the sum of happiness." This quote by suffragist and philanthropist Clara Barton so eloquently describes the issues within the United States prison system and its desperate need to for reformation. Chapter four of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander brought forth the gaspingly oppressive sector of prison (via the judicial branch). Alexander illuminated the reader to the realities of the United States prison system and the covert nuances of racism, discrimination, and the mechanisms brought forth to perpetuate 'legal slavery' in America. In regards to the major points of the chapter, the author described: the effect of prison on society, African Americans relationship in regards to prison- i.e. their chances to go and the societal influences that make African Americans disproportionately susceptible to the prison system- as well as the person's role in society after they are released from prison.…
Throughout the book it is shown how discriminating the policies in place can be. Much of the book describes the consequences that follow convicted felons, whether they are guilty or not, and how the system is racially biased. Banned from public housing, discriminated against by those hiring, essentially trapped as a second class citizen. A racial caste, developed years after slavery and Jim Crow have been dismantled. Alexander establishes her argument that the U.S justice system and the “war on drugs” is merely a means of racial control, hiding under the label of “colorblind”.…
Mass incarceration started in the 1980s, when the war on drugs arose. The U.S. prison system is a failure on every level. There are a total of 2,418,352 federal and state prisons in the United States and 2.3 million people occupy them. According to California prison focus “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens”. The U.S. has more prisons than colleges. America also has private prisons owned by greedy corporate millionaires and billionaires.The more people in prison, the more money private prisons make. Tom Beasley, co-founder of the Corrections Corporation of America(CCA) stated that “you just sell prisons like you were selling cars or real estate or hamburgers”. According to CCA they have nearly 5,500 acres of land, and 2,500 acres are undeveloped for future growth projects. That means they want to keep putting people in jail. There are 4,575 private prisons in the United States. According to NYU School of Law “ since 2000, the effect on the crime rate of increasing incarceration has been zero. Even though the crime rate has not gone down, the government continues to put people in jail. Private prisons have continued because they make millions of dollars off of owning private prisons, and putting people in jail. War on drugs was the beginning of mass incarceration. In the 1990’s state and federal prisons started exploding at the seams because of the increase in drug use and possession of it. The drug that made the huge impact on society was Cocaine, known as “crack”. Cocaine was a powder, which was known to be more sophisticated than crack. Crack was used in poor black communities. The biggest surge in the use of crack was between 1980s and 1990s. Black and latino communities were hit the hardest in the drug epidemic. There was a high…
In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander examines our current criminal justice system and the mass incarceration of African Americans in the United States. She argues that the War on Drugs and drug offense convictions are the single most compelling cause for the magnitude of people of color behind bars. Prisons are used as a system of racial and social control that function in the same way as Jim Crow laws. It is no longer legal to discriminate against people based on race. By targeting black and minority communities through the War on Drugs and labeling them as felons, all the old forms of discrimination became legal. The racial caste systems of slavery and Jim Crow have not disappeared, but…
Criminal justice stakeholders affected by various social, political, economic, and institutional forces throughout the last five decades have implemented policies that have increased reliance on incarceration and its punitive purpose. In contemporary criminal justice reform efforts to scale back mass incarceration, some of the most active stakeholders have been this year’s presidential candidates, the for-profit prison industry, and community-based organizations.…
The rhetoric used during the war on drugs ensured that a long withstanding stereotype would remain impactful in today’s society. The war on drugs had a massive impact on black communities , which stemmed from the incarceration of black Americans. The rate at which black men were incarcerated drastically increased by the year after the war on drugs, to the point at which, according to the Stanford Center on Poverty & Inequality, “black people in this country are imprisoned at more than five times the rate of whites; one in 10 black children has a parent behind bars, compared with about one in 60 white kids,” (Hager). Black men are disproportionately affected by the incarceration system, and this injustice directly impacts both the lives of black men and their families. Young black men grow up in communities in which their role models are imprisoned.…
For generations people of color have been put into a system caste of injustice. From slavery, to the Jim Crow era, and now in today’s society. Today in the United States the incarceration rate has nearly tripled over the years. With the significant increase in the incarceration rates, it leads you to wonder what the cause may be. The government has found a way to indirectly create another system caste, which we live in today. That system caste is called the mass incarceration, also known as the New Jim Crow. In the mass incarceration one term can describe the whole system of injustice; The Prison Industrial Complex. The Prison Industrial…
The high rates of imprisonment among poor men reflect the effects of mass incarceration on the microlevel as well as the outcome of when law enforcement focuses on socioeconomic disadvantages in urban communities. Could it be that the criminal Justice system is deeply embedded in maintain poverty racially condense areas? Evidence shows mixed views of the social consequences of mass incarceration. This is due to the problem of invisible equality where those who are incarcerated are unavailable for social research, thus affecting statistics on severe economic disadvantage regarding mass incarceration. For one employment rates have decreased with the increase of incarceration rates. There is limited proof that mass incarceration undermines family…
The Thirteenth Amendment was designed to free slaves. However, the prison system appears to be a form of slavery itself with the high number of Africa-American incarcerated. Out of the whole prison population, about 80 percent or more are of African descent. After the Civil War, an enormous amount of African-American men were being sent to jail or prison for a long time because of petty crimes such as loitering. That was in the late 1800’s and it is still going on today. The tension between law enforcement officers and African-American is caused by the way police officers are portrayed to African-Americans and how African-American are portrayed to police officers.…
In, “Beyond the Prison Bubble,” published in the Wilson Quarterly in the winter 2011, Joan Petersilia shows different choices about the imprisonment systems. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any free nation (para.1). The crime rate over a thirty year span had grown by five times since 1960 to 1990. There are more people of color or Hispanics in federal and state institutions then there are of any other nationality. The prison system is growing more than ever; the growth in twenty years has been about 21 new prisons. Mass imprisonment has reduced crime but, has not helped the inmate to gradually return back to society with skills or education. But the offenders leaving prison now are more likely to have fairly long criminal records, lengthy histories of alcohol and drug abuse, significant periods of unemployment and homelessness, and physical or mental disability (par.12).…
The United States of America promotes itself as the land of the free but, is it truly free? People believe what they see or are told without actually giving it thought, as the saying goes, “See no evil, hear no evil.” The people of today have been brainwashed to believe that what the media portrays is fact and that’s all there is to it. We are aware of what life can be like in other countries, and compare it to the United States to give ourselves the illusion that we are free. Although it may be true that we have more freedom than other nations, it is not true that the United States is an absolutely free nation. The incarceration rates of this country are devastatingly high that the prison system operates more like a business than as a correction…
The racial inequality against African Americans in the United States prison system is one of the largest issues to take place for many years. In the nineteen-thirties, blacks were three times more likely to be imprisoned than whites. In the nineteen-nineties the ratio increased to more than seven times that of whites. Til this day, this country has about three hundred million people, with two million people behind bars. But within those two million people, African Americans - black men, in particular, are the majority of prisoners despite whites being the majority of the United States. Many African Americans who came out of the prison system are at a disadvantage when it comes to starting their life as a free individual, getting a job, or even…
More than half of prisoners are currently serving time for non-violent drug related offenses, as the popularity for “war on drugs” has increased over the last decade. The majority of inmates are harshly sentenced, including doubling of imprisonment time for repeat offenders. For example, the federal law issues that selling 28 grams of crack cocaine requires a sentence of at least five years. Because even more convicts are being sent to prison, overcrowding has forced institutions to release prisoners early to meet budget requriements. Most of these inmates become homeless and are diagnosed with many medical problems, often getting little to no help. Being that this subject is an issue currently in society, I also had to cope with consequences…
Today 's corrections systems often make offenders worse, along with raising the recidivism rates. America needs more then a new system, but a new way of thinking. Reformation or rehabilitation is not something that can be imposed or forced, on another; it cannot be created in the individual offender by the burden of external measures. Prisons in America have been portrayed to be places for reform and rehabilitation; places where criminals belong so that society can be safe. Yet studies and statistics have yielded such an image to be an illusion. With roughly 40% of the world 's prisoners incarcerated in the United States, we just may have to re-think our current systems (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2006). What happens when good people are found in an extenuating circumstance, which leads them to become involved in drugs? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? Workable Solutions A policy using boot camp to house low-level drug offenders instead of a long prison sentence would have a three effects; it would cut prison costs and overcrowding, it would be a fairer and more democratic punishment; and it would keep…