TNJC Blog 3 - 1.31.16

     There are numerous myths about the criminal justice system that Michelle Alexander addresses in her book The New Jim Crow. The one myth that stood out to me the most was how people of color commit more drug crimes than white people do. This myth is completely stereotypical and she proves it to be untrue with plenty of statistics. She claims that, “Whites tend to sell to whites; blacks to blacks.” (Alexander 61) She goes on to give a quote from someone in the National Drug Control Policy stating that generally if your child has purchased drugs it is from someone in their own race. There is also another side myth to the idea that people of color commit more drug crimes — that myth is the notion that “most illegal drug use and sales happen in the ghetto.” (61) Which is proven as “fiction” because, yes, drug trafficking does happen there, but it also does happens everywhere else in America. Alexander addresses these myths with statistics and factual reasoning. For example, she gives the statistic that “1 in every 14 black men were behind bars in 2006, compared with 1 in 106 white men.” This statistic specifically doesn’t show the ratio of black to white committing drug crimes, but the racial bias of how black people commit more drug crimes over white people. She gives another statistic on page 60 stating, “white students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, use crack cocaine at eight times the rate of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students.” Honestly, as a reader, I did not expect this at all, I most certainly felt it would be the other way around due to how I was brought up and how other things are presented on the news. Alexander has dispelled these myths with the usage of statistics, and since statistics can generally not be denied they have reasonably backed up the denial of the myth that people of color commit more drug related crimes than white people do. It is just that people of color are targeted more often than white people are on a daily basis.