This helped me understand some things I didn't really get in the books, "The Sellout," "Between the World and Me," and "The Underground Railroad." Living overseas for 12 years has put me out of touch with issues in the U.S. I've watched at a distance the debates on police brutality and racial profiling in the news, but haven't looked at it closely. Michelle Alexander's book, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," explains how the War on Drugs initiated a crackdown that devastated the urban poor black community through laws and policies too punitive resulting in mass incarcerations creating the largest prison populations worldwide in the U.S. Case studies reveal how racial profiling is happening through the police and justice system and targeting low-income African Americans. While scholars have studied race and the justice system for many years, there is a new group that is comparing it to the Jim Crow laws of old and slavery. Michelle Alexander offers an exhaustive and well-documented look at how the current justice system does not work for poor people and needs to be restructured.
The author effectively argues how court cases and policies have stigmatized convicted African American offenders limiting their rights as citizens. She sheds light on unjust laws and policing that tears apart families in unfair and unjust ways. While the Jim Crow analogy gets the public's attention it is problematic as argued by
Yale Professor James Forman Jr. While Forman agrees with Alexander's assertion that the harsh systematic approach to mass incarceration needs to be restructured, he would like to see all minorities included and violent crimes examined, in addition to drug offenders, and inclusion of local prisons, not just federal prison populations that Alexander examines. He also thinks that the black middle and upper class that didn't exist during Jim Crow and slavery days makes for a flawed analogy. He presents an excellent counterpoint to the debate.
5 Smileys
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