Racism And The Criminal Justice System Essay
Racism and criminal justice system in America
Racism and the criminal justice system in America have been a big issue of debate; African Americans are been incarcerated more than the whites. They are the target of mistreatment, disempowerment, and overrepresented in prison populations. This paper will explain in dept about the history of racism and the criminal justice system and civil right movement, the political economy and the origin of the current criminal justice buildup. What the law-and-order regime achieved, and who is it really aimed at.
For decades African Americans and people of color have been the victim of race, especially the men. A young African American man from Laurel, Mississippi Willie McGee, was sentenced to death for accused of raping Willette Hawkins, a white housewife. At first, McGee’s case was barely noticed, covered only in hostile Mississippi newspapers …show more content…
and far-left publications such as the Daily worker. Then Bella Abzug, a young New York labor Lawyer, was hired by the Civil Right Congress an aggressive civil rights organization with ties to the Communist Party of the United States- to oversee McGee’s defense. Together with William Patterson, the son of a slave and a devout believer in the need for revolutionary change, Abzug and a group of white Mississippi lawyers risked their lives to plead McGee case. As McGee’s court battle came to an end, his supporters rallied to President Harry S. Truman and the US supreme Court with clemency pleas, and some of the well known Americans including William Faulkner, Albert Einstein, Jessica Mitford, Paul Robinson, Norman Mailer, and Josephine Baker spoke out on McGee’ behalf.
By the time the case ended in 1951 with McGee’s public execution with electric chair in Mississippi, “Free Willie McGee” had become a rallying cry among civil rights activists, progressives, leftists, and Communist Party members. Millions of people worldwide were convinced that McGee had been framed and that the real story involved a consensual love affair between him and Mrs. Hawkins was one that had instigated and controlled. Knowing the truth behind this controversial theory was confusion, misinformation, and the pain that still resonate today. The mysteries surrounding McGee’s case lives on in this provocative tale of justice in the Deep South.
US capitalism hit a duel social and economic crisis in the late sixties, and it was in response to this crisis that the criminal justice that today buildup began.
And resume in earnest during the early and mid eighties with Regan’s war on drugs. Since then they have been on steady path toward ever more surveillance and repression state. Initially this was buildup in response to racial and political rebellion, and in response to the vicious economic restructuring of the Regan era. And the restructuring was itself a right wing strategy for addressing the economic crisis which first appeared in the mid and late sixties. In other to restore sagging business profits, and then the welfare of working people had to be sacrificed. Another criminal justice crackdown has become, intentionally or otherwise, a way to manage rising inequality and surplus populations. And the poor people where the one that suffered the situation throughout this process of economic restructuring, particularly poor people of color. Thus it is poor people of color who make up the bulk of American
prison.
Also, equality was one of the problems that blacks suffered during Jim Crow laws and it was what white American fears most. Not until February 17, 1919, when thousands of African American soldiers fresh from victory in the Ardennes offensive marched triumphantly up Fifth Avenue, through Manhattan’s cheering crows to a Harlem homecoming. This was because they had lived up to their end of the bargain with America. So they expected the full rights of Citizenship, nothing less, only a year earlier, while they fought in France. Jim Crow and other hated laws that stigmatized African Americans had been reaffirmed.
But this civil rights moment was not to be. Instead the euphoria of victory evaporated to be replaced by the worst spate of anti-Black violence; labeled the Red Summer, the riots and lynching’s would last from April to November 1919, claiming hundreds of lives, and leave thousands homeless.
Mostly Blacks where the victims, at least twenty seven major riots and mob actions immobilized the nation’s capital and cities large and small, including Chicago, Omaha, Knoxville, Charleston, and the delta town of Elaine, Arkansas, but something happened that whites had not expected. Emboldened by the war, whether from experience in the trenches or not the factory floor, or in the cotton fields of the rural south, blacks fought back; picking up any weapon that was at hand, their retaliation against armed mobs was swift. It was the first stirrings of the civil rights movement that would change America forever.
Bibliography
Mcwhirter Cameron. “Red summer”. New York: Herny Holet, 2011.
Parenti Christian. “Lockdown America”. New York: Verso, 2008.
Heard Alex. “The Eyes of Willie Mcgee”. Mississippi: Jim Leeson, 2010.
Loury C. Glenn. “Race Incarceration and American Values”. Boston: Pamela S. Karlan, Tommie Shelby, and Loic Wacquant, 2008.
Racism and the criminal justice system in America have been a big issue of debate; African Americans are been incarcerated more than the whites. They are the target of mistreatment, disempowerment, and overrepresented in prison populations. This paper will explain in dept about the history of racism and the criminal justice system and civil right movement, the political economy and the origin of the current criminal justice buildup. What the law-and-order regime achieved, and who is it really aimed at.
For decades African Americans and people of color have been the victim of race, especially the men. A young African American man from Laurel, Mississippi Willie McGee, was sentenced to death for accused of raping Willette Hawkins, a white housewife. At first, McGee’s case was barely noticed, covered only in hostile Mississippi newspapers …show more content…
and far-left publications such as the Daily worker. Then Bella Abzug, a young New York labor Lawyer, was hired by the Civil Right Congress an aggressive civil rights organization with ties to the Communist Party of the United States- to oversee McGee’s defense. Together with William Patterson, the son of a slave and a devout believer in the need for revolutionary change, Abzug and a group of white Mississippi lawyers risked their lives to plead McGee case. As McGee’s court battle came to an end, his supporters rallied to President Harry S. Truman and the US supreme Court with clemency pleas, and some of the well known Americans including William Faulkner, Albert Einstein, Jessica Mitford, Paul Robinson, Norman Mailer, and Josephine Baker spoke out on McGee’ behalf.
By the time the case ended in 1951 with McGee’s public execution with electric chair in Mississippi, “Free Willie McGee” had become a rallying cry among civil rights activists, progressives, leftists, and Communist Party members. Millions of people worldwide were convinced that McGee had been framed and that the real story involved a consensual love affair between him and Mrs. Hawkins was one that had instigated and controlled. Knowing the truth behind this controversial theory was confusion, misinformation, and the pain that still resonate today. The mysteries surrounding McGee’s case lives on in this provocative tale of justice in the Deep South.
US capitalism hit a duel social and economic crisis in the late sixties, and it was in response to this crisis that the criminal justice that today buildup began.
And resume in earnest during the early and mid eighties with Regan’s war on drugs. Since then they have been on steady path toward ever more surveillance and repression state. Initially this was buildup in response to racial and political rebellion, and in response to the vicious economic restructuring of the Regan era. And the restructuring was itself a right wing strategy for addressing the economic crisis which first appeared in the mid and late sixties. In other to restore sagging business profits, and then the welfare of working people had to be sacrificed. Another criminal justice crackdown has become, intentionally or otherwise, a way to manage rising inequality and surplus populations. And the poor people where the one that suffered the situation throughout this process of economic restructuring, particularly poor people of color. Thus it is poor people of color who make up the bulk of American
prison.
Also, equality was one of the problems that blacks suffered during Jim Crow laws and it was what white American fears most. Not until February 17, 1919, when thousands of African American soldiers fresh from victory in the Ardennes offensive marched triumphantly up Fifth Avenue, through Manhattan’s cheering crows to a Harlem homecoming. This was because they had lived up to their end of the bargain with America. So they expected the full rights of Citizenship, nothing less, only a year earlier, while they fought in France. Jim Crow and other hated laws that stigmatized African Americans had been reaffirmed.
But this civil rights moment was not to be. Instead the euphoria of victory evaporated to be replaced by the worst spate of anti-Black violence; labeled the Red Summer, the riots and lynching’s would last from April to November 1919, claiming hundreds of lives, and leave thousands homeless.
Mostly Blacks where the victims, at least twenty seven major riots and mob actions immobilized the nation’s capital and cities large and small, including Chicago, Omaha, Knoxville, Charleston, and the delta town of Elaine, Arkansas, but something happened that whites had not expected. Emboldened by the war, whether from experience in the trenches or not the factory floor, or in the cotton fields of the rural south, blacks fought back; picking up any weapon that was at hand, their retaliation against armed mobs was swift. It was the first stirrings of the civil rights movement that would change America forever.
Bibliography
Mcwhirter Cameron. “Red summer”. New York: Herny Holet, 2011.
Parenti Christian. “Lockdown America”. New York: Verso, 2008.
Heard Alex. “The Eyes of Willie Mcgee”. Mississippi: Jim Leeson, 2010.
Loury C. Glenn. “Race Incarceration and American Values”. Boston: Pamela S. Karlan, Tommie Shelby, and Loic Wacquant, 2008.