New Jim Crow Theme

The book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander, has a few different themes. The themes that stuck out to me from both readings and lectures are ignorance and denial, and the failure of colorblindness. The central theme of Alexander’s book is basically that the American system of mass incarceration is a systematic effort to ostracize people of color just like the old Jim Crow laws did in the 19th and 20th centuries. The present-day prisons make it hard for those released to find houses and jobs, and even lead regular lives like those who have never been to prison. The New Jim Crow can only be continued if the American people go through mass denial and ignorance. Most people, however, know
what is going on but choose to run away from and turn the other cheek to the appalling, atrocious denial of civil liberties. The people find it easier to pretend as if they are not part of the problem so they do not need to create a solution. The media depicts black people as criminals and the publicizing of colorblindness leads to the brainwashing of the people to think that black people are supposed to all do or sell drugs and that that is not racial prejudice and there is none.
Colorblindness, nonetheless, does not actually work. Colorblindness, in essence, states that everyone is created equally by the government regardless of race and the laws surrounding it seem to make it sound factual. The government and law enforcement do take part in racial profiling, granting people or color harsher jail sentences and punishments than their white counterparts. It is not uncommon for people to receive prison sentences of more than fifty years for minor crimes (Alexander, 91). The media bands together to create this negative, misleading image that black people are almost destined to display criminal behavior. Because of mandatory minimums and the three-strike laws, when people of color are guilty of minor crimes, they end up receiving ludicrously lengthy prison sentences. Being released from prison makes life hard for people of color so most often, they have no choice but to return to a life of crime. This, in turn, almost guarantees reincarceration for formerly incarcerated
people. “Today a criminal freed from prison has scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a freed slave or black person living "free" in Mississippi at the height of Jim Crow” (Alexander, 141). This is something interesting to think about because this the author, Michelle Alexander’s, main argument. The way formerly incarcerated people are treated today is the same if not worse than the way black people were treated under the original Jim Crow laws in the South.
It seems as though we have made racial progress, but the marginalization criminals face puts them in the same place as in the past. “It is fair to say we have witnessed an evolution in the United States from a racial caste system based entirely on exploitation (slavery), to one based largely on subordination (Jim Crow), to one defined by marginalization (mass incarceration)” (Alexander, 219). Slavery has been abolished, there are black men and women in high positions of power. For the poor blacks, they will be racially profiled and arrested or know someone who has been arrested. Poor black people will be stereotyped against and have their rights taken from them. Mass incarceration is a predicament down the timeline of both slavery and Jim Crow and stresses a comparable reckoning as the caste systems in the past. Law enforcement was incentivized to go after people of color.