Essay On Mass Incarceration

One crucial goal for ending mass incarceration should be ending the media’s criminalization of black youth. Many believe that the issue of mass incarceration is not an issue of systemic racism, but an issue of “black on black crime”: crime that occurs within black communities. Harvard professor Randall Kennedy writes that, “most crime is intra-racial, so black victims suffer disproportionately at the hands of black criminals” (Bibas). The belief that crime only exists within black communities between black men reinforces the stereotype that black men are criminals by nature. Black men have been stigmatized as criminals ever since the early days of American history. D.W. Griffith’s infamous 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation is the clearest example of the …show more content…
observes that in the film, “every image you see of a black person is a demeaned, animal-like image. Cannibalistic, animalistic: the image of the African-American male” (qtd. in Duvernay). The Birth of a Nation used blackface to mock black men and depicted them as dangerous, savage criminals with no human emotion or reason. This depiction created a foundation for the war on drugs’ depiction of black men decades later. For decades after the war on drugs, the media has depicted black men as “super predators” and dangerous criminals. The repetition of the criminal stereotype limits the public opinion of black men. It dehumanizes them in the eyes of the public and enables the unjust incarceration of black men. Political commentator Joshua Dubois addresses the conversation surrounding what many refer to as black on black crime, "but isn't this just a function of more crime in black communities? Aren't we arresting violent super-predators, the type we see on television….the answer is no...People of color are arrested in large numbers for relatively minor offenses...and then given sentences that outpace their white counterparts " (Dubois