Jim Crow Crime Research Paper

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WHAT IS THE HUMAN COST OF THE NEW JIM CROW? In every black part of cities or towns, you see alarming numbers of black men and women of all ages with felony convictions. Once labeled a felon, employment or any integration into society disappears. Today’s lynching is a felony charge. Today’s lynching is incarceration. Prisoners are hidden from public view because mass incarceration is a far more extreme form of physical and residential segregation than (the original) Jim Crow segregation. Rather than merely moving black people to the other side of town or corralling them in ghettos, mass incarceration locks them in cages. Bars and wall keep hundreds of thousands of black people away from mainstream society. Blacks that are labeled…show more content…
When people think about crime, especially drug crime, they do not think about suburban homemakers violating laws regulating prescription drugs or white frat boys using meth. Drug crime in this country is understood to be black, and it is because drug crime is black in the public’s mind that no one has cared about what happens to drug criminals, at least not the way they would have cared if the criminals were white. It is this failure to care across color lines that lie at the core of this system of control and every racial caste system that has existed in the United States or anywhere else in the world. Looking at civil rights accomplishments like Brown v. Board of Education, 1954, Brown accomplished for African Americans little more than Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. A civil war had to be waged to end slavery; a mass movement was necessary to bring a formal end to Jim Crow. Those who think that less is required to dismantle mass incarceration and build a new way of thinking for a compassionate rather than punitive impulse toward poor people of color fail to appreciate the distance between Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream and the ongoing racial nightmare for those locked up…show more content…
It is largely ineffective and extraordinarily expensive. Mass incarceration creates more crime than it prevents, by ripping apart fragile social networks, destroying families, and creating a permanent class of unemployable people. Although it is common to think of poverty and unemployment as leading to crime and incarceration, the War on Drugs is a major cause of poverty, chronic unemployment, broken families, and crime today. Incarceration has reached such extreme levels in many urban communities that a prison sentence and a felon label poses a much greater threat to urban families than the crime itself. Mass incarceration needs to be the main battlefront in U.S. race relations. Perhaps the best illustration of this fact is that thanks in part to affirmative action, police departments, and law enforcement agencies nationwide have come to look more like America than ever. Affirmative action has happened at precisely the moment of a war on the ghetto poor has played a leading role in the systematic mass incarceration of people of color. The color of police chiefs across the country has changed, but the role of the police in our society has

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