Many people would not think that a racial caste system exists in United States, especially after Barack Obama was elected as a president. However, mass incarceration in the United States caused by the war on drugs functions as a system of racialized social control that is similar to Jim Crow. The current criminal justice system in the United States permanently keeps a huge percentage of the African American community out of the mainstream society and economy.
The author retraces why the racial hierarchy is happening in chapter 1. Bacon’s rebellion accelerated slavery to settle in United States. Seized with the fear of the alliance of whites and black laborers, the planter class granted special privileges to white laborers to eliminate the chance of future alliances. However, after the Civil War, the black slaves had to be released, and the plantation owners faced immediate economic destitution. Southern states adopted the black codes as a backlash. A central element of the black codes were vagrancy laws; states criminalized black men selectively who were unemployed. Black …show more content…
They regarded civil rights protests as violence and law offenses, and the dramatic increases in the national crime rates became a foundation for ‘get tough on crime’. The budgets of federal law enforcement soared, and so did the population in jail and prison. During that time, unemployed African Americans started to sell drugs – mostly crack cocaine. President Reagan announced the War on Drugs and drew media’s attention to build support for its new war. The House passed legislation allowed the death penalty for some drug-related crimes and authorized the admission of some illegally obtained evidences to drug courts. Punishment for distribution of crack, which was associated with blacks, was much more severe than that of powder, which was associated with
The author retraces why the racial hierarchy is happening in chapter 1. Bacon’s rebellion accelerated slavery to settle in United States. Seized with the fear of the alliance of whites and black laborers, the planter class granted special privileges to white laborers to eliminate the chance of future alliances. However, after the Civil War, the black slaves had to be released, and the plantation owners faced immediate economic destitution. Southern states adopted the black codes as a backlash. A central element of the black codes were vagrancy laws; states criminalized black men selectively who were unemployed. Black …show more content…
They regarded civil rights protests as violence and law offenses, and the dramatic increases in the national crime rates became a foundation for ‘get tough on crime’. The budgets of federal law enforcement soared, and so did the population in jail and prison. During that time, unemployed African Americans started to sell drugs – mostly crack cocaine. President Reagan announced the War on Drugs and drew media’s attention to build support for its new war. The House passed legislation allowed the death penalty for some drug-related crimes and authorized the admission of some illegally obtained evidences to drug courts. Punishment for distribution of crack, which was associated with blacks, was much more severe than that of powder, which was associated with