Southern Strategy and Mass Incarceration
Ibrahim Noor
In American politics, the southern strategy refers to methods the Republican Party used to gain political support in the South by appealing to the racism against African Americans by many southern white voters. This strategy relied on supporting racist ideologies, mainly against African Americans. The reason for it was because many people in the south at the time …show more content…
George Wallace, who ran against Nixon and Humphrey as a third party candidate, won up to 91% of the vote in some southern states. The reason seemed to be his use of the Southern Strategy, simply because he was sometimes openly racist while campaigning. But this strategy is still being practiced and was used by Donald Trump when he was still running for president. Trumps votes in the south skyrocketed after his statement of banning muslims or latinos, and significantly after he gave this message to the black community “What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump? What do you have to lose?" he asked. "You live in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose”, though Trump expressed he was not making a racially charged statement but it was still viewed this way by many. For all we know, we will come back in the future and use him as an example of southern strategy affecting prison …show more content…
People with these racist ideologies saw them (and some still do) as rapists, thieves, gang members, and drug dealers. This was the image Southern Strategist were trying to produce to draw in raxis voters. Around the mid to late 1900s, black males began to be incarcerated by mass, for the criminal acts listed above. Many who are arrested were then kept over their sentence. Reason of this being the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), owner of the most private prisons in USA, getting a profit out of selling cheap labor to corporations by using inmates. This itself is one of the main reasons for our situation of mass incarceration. In this quote from The New Jim crow by Michelle Alexander “The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black community itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.”, in this quote Michelle explains clearly that this problem will only become widely known once the powers carrying it out admit to it. Those millions of people to whom this stereotype of “criminal” has been