Research Paper On Mass Incarceration

Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Mike Brown, and many more have joined a category of African American people, who have been unjustly slain. Although, their murders have been highly publicized, caused uproars and inspired movements such as #blacklivesmatter, the people in this category have received little to no justice. It appears that we are seeing more and more African American lives taken. The fact that most of these murders are at the hands of white police officers or vigilantes calls to question whether the slave master has earned a badge and if he swapped his whip for a gun. These homicides are a modern-day mechanism for social control of African Americans. It is just an addition to the many that already exist today like mass incarceration. This new …show more content…
One of the already established methods that this probably closely relates to is Mass Incarceration because it does a good job of taking the lives of African Americans away from them and reminding them where they belong. In Michelle Alexander’s the New Jim Crow she points out that Mass Incarceration is used to keep African Americans in “their place” as second class citizens: felons are not allowed to vote, have a hard time finding employment and housing. “Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.” (Alexander) It takes strips Black people of their lives and right without taking their lives. It does not invest back into them or give them a second chance. Through this and the police and vigilante killings they are should that they cannot afford mistakes because they will pay with their lives or their opportunities. This tell African Americans that they should listen to how they are told to behave or