Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow provides a standpoint on a new “racial caste system” where blacks are incarcerated more often than white people. This standpoint she at first disagreed with and thought was rubbish, but she grew to believe that it was in fact accurate. The mass incarceration idea that is talked about provides a sense of “social control” keeping a social caste system that is a, “well-disguised system of racialized social control that is strikingly similar to Jim Crow.” (Alexander 7) She goes on to support this claim by talking about the past social controls such as slavery and Jim Crow. In the first paragraph she makes a point that I have been dwelling on while reading through the beginning of the book. She says that Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because, “he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.” (Alexander 5) Now my question to her would be, why exactly is he on parole? Why is he labeled as a felon? From my stance, he must have done something against the law in order to get himself in that position. So, personally, I do not see a problem with anything that she is saying. After typing these few sentences I went to search for background knowledge about the topic of “Jarvious Cotton” and found a news article about the case that he was in. It tells the reader that he was “charged with killing the son of a prominent white baker.” I could see where Alexander was coming from, she could be saying that the court was racially bias in deciding if a colored man had killed a caucasian man’s son, which is entirely possible. She also makes the point that “we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’..” (Alexander 6) She does make a very well point about this, that we do in fact have a lot of colored people going to jail for various reasons, including for the “drug war”. To counter this claim, I would have to go along the lines of that colored people, as well as minorities commit more crimes than caucasians. Why? I honestly have no idea. It is a stereotype that they do commit more crimes, but it is true. If the community wanted to not be blamed with this stereotype then they should not commit the crimes.
In conclusion, I do not agree with he point that Michelle Alexander is making about the New Jim Crow as of yet. She still has yet to convince me that the criminal justice system is taking place as the New Jim Crow. It may be wrong of me to make the accusation that more colored people commit crimes over white people, but I feel as if that is what I have come to believe as true.
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