According to dictionary.com, Social control is the influence of any element in social life working to maintain the pattern of such life. Michelle Alexander writes in her novel, “The New Jim Crow,” that as African Americans obtained political power and began the long march toward greater social and economic equality, whites reacted with panic and outrage. Since slavery, forms of social control towards African Americans include: debt peonage/ sharecropping, convict lease systems, Jim Crow laws and Mass incarceration, the contemporary form of social control. The New Jim Crow is reincarnation of the old Jim Crow in which people are swept into the criminal justice system and branded as criminal and felons so that their rights are stripped away.
