The Machiavellian Justice System

Great Essays
Politics have played a significant role when determining how White America views the black race as a whole. Over the years people have characterized and associated blacks as the criminals and predators of society. They relate blacks to drugs, violence, and crimes. As a result, they enslave and incarcerate blacks. They use their Machiavellian justice system and laws created by them to eliminate or impoverish the black race in the white society. In this paper, I will elaborate on how America went from being a country of enslavement to the land of the free, but yet it is today’s era of mass incarceration rate. Detail on how it abuse the entire justification of prisons. I will also go into detail about how the 13th amendment is the dominant reason …show more content…
In order to force blacks into the hands of whites in need of cheap labor, they created the vagrancy law. The vagrancy law made it illegal for a person of color to be unemployed. If they were caught they could be thrown in prison and sentenced harsh time along with expensive fines. As an alternative option, instead of residing in prison white masters would offer to pay poor blacks fines and in return they would have to come work on their land to pay off their debt. Because a pay wage wasn 't established, they were often paid little to nothing. Therefore, blacks were enslaved by their debt to white masters for an extensive amount of time. Black codes were laws enacted after the Civil War. Its main purpose was to keep slavery alive and blacks inferior to the white supremacy, while the 13th Amendment allegedly eliminated it. It denied blacks from having any other occupation besides farming or a servant. Because these jobs were low paying jobs, it ensured that blacks would not leave the poor economic barrier that white supremacy had embedded them in since …show more content…
For example ALEC (America Legislative Exchange Council). According to www.alec.org , ALEC is a “nonpartisan, voluntary membership organization of state legislators dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.” In reality ALEC is an organization that manipulates laws and create laws so their members can profit from those laws. Their memberships are made up of business such as AT&T and ExxonMobil. ALEC even profited off the tough on crime bill. The tough on crime bill gave 8.7 million dollars to build and operate new prisons. This allowed members of ALEC to create new contracts to gain revenue off of prisons. Rather they were buying cheap labor or selling their goods to the prisons, they increased their profits. This act just gave Greedy America another motive to keep prisons cells full. Blacks have been abuse, misused, and impoverish by the justice system and white supremacy since forever. They have destroyed homes and lives just to make a profit off blacks. America portrays its-self as the land of the free but enslaves thousands of its own natural born citizens ever year. America says that slavery is immoral and dehumanize, but yet they promote it every way they can. In my opinion America is just a country built on

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    According to the Mississipi black codes, black codes in the United States were of numerous official laws in the States of the former Confederacy after the American Civil War in 1865 and 1866. These laws were intended to restrict the freedom of African Americans and forced them to work with a low salary. They were designed to ensure the continuity of white supremacy. These black codes were modeled after the slave codes that were placed before the civil war. In January of 1865, before the end of the civil war, the House of Representatives approved the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution that definitively prohibited the slavery in all the territory of the Union.…

    • 439 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Rebuilding the south Reese construction 1. Ways the lives of the African-American changed after they were freed? After the African-Americans were freed, some of them but not all were returned to their families in Africa. Most had to start learning how to live for themselves. They had no education, no knowledge of how America worked at the time.…

    • 1727 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The New Jim Crow Summary

    • 1444 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Book review: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander In the book, the New Jim Crow, Alexander Michelle gives a descriptive information of how the American government is set up to put down the Black community. She argues that the current system is just a successor of the other past system of slavery. For each chapter, the author makes detailed explanations of her points. With subtitles, she is able to touch on every component within her topics.…

    • 1444 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    E. Choose five of the following terms and give a brief definition of each. (2 points each, 10 total) Choose from the following: black codes — Common Sense — Free-Soilers — maroon colonies — military draft — peculiar institution — push factor — sharecropping — Sons of Liberty — temperance 1: Black Codes: A body of laws, statutes, and rules enacted by southern states immediately after the Civil War to regain control over the freed slaves, maintain white supremacy, and ensure the continued supply of cheap labor. 2: Free Soil Party: a short-lived political party in the United States active in the 1848 and 1852 presidential elections, and in some state elections. 3: Military draft: Compulsory enrollment, especially for the armed forces; a monetary payment exacted by a government in wartime.…

    • 2069 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Reconstruction refers to the time period directly following the Civil War, where America attempted to bring both the white and black south back into the Union. Reconstruction was therefore extremely difficult, as whites were dealing with their loss and the fact that they’d have to live under those that beat them during the war, and that they’d have to live along side their newly freed slaves, those who they were bought up their entire lives to believe they were superior to. The main thing blacks desired straight out of slavery was freedom. They wanted freedom from white men, from being owned, from everything that they were.…

    • 1410 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Black Codes, later, Jim Crow Laws were introduced in Southern states to supress African-Americans and denied them the right to vote, serve on a jury and marry a white person. Southern stakeholders, left defeated…

    • 1180 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    The New Jim Crow In Michelle Alexander’s book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” the author makes a case that modern African-Americans are under the control of the criminal justice system. This includes African Americans who are incarcerated in prisons and jails as well as those on probation or parole. Alexander claims that there are more African Americans under the thumb of the criminal justice system today than were enslaved in 1850. Moreover, discrimination against African Americans is also at an all-time high in the housing, education, and employment sectors and with regard to voting rights.…

    • 1583 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Indeed, slavery set the foundation for the conditions in which minorities, especially blacks, live now. There is truly no arguing that racism is real, wrong, and very much present in American…

    • 1579 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “13th”, a 2016 documentary, dives deep into details regarding prison systems in the United States. The documentary discusses the history of inequality as well. The title “13th” gets its name as reference to the thirteenth amendment. The thirteenth amendment states that it is unethical for one to become a slave; this documentary shows just how ironic it is that prisoners often times get treated as one. Though, some may disagree.…

    • 780 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The documentary film “13th” directed by Ava DuVernay is an interesting look at the prison system, how and why Black and Hispanic people make up the majority of the prison population and how the problems within the interconnected political, judicial, and prison system have grown and changed over time. It discusses topics such as the death penalty, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the dehumanization of prisons and about how labeling individuals and groups and criminals effects perception of these people or groups. The documentary touches on the death penalty at certain points in relation to other issues within the criminal justice system. The pressure for sentencing people under the death penalty was overwhelming for politicians.…

    • 1687 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    From this, slave codes that “made blacks and their children the property (or ‘chattels’) for life of their white masters” arose (Kennedy, 72). Slavery continued within America until 1865 when the thirteenth amendment (which declared slavery illegal) was ratified…

    • 1643 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Freedom After Civil War

    • 407 Words
    • 2 Pages

    After the Civil War many black slaves were promised freedom as full American citizens of The United States of America. They were given their “freedom” but due to the economic struggle of of the time and the left over racism from the Civil War their freedom had become severely limited. Black people in the time after the Civil War had been cut short of freedom from many things that could not make them have the same freedoms of that of a regular American citizen. The first point of this limited freedom comes from the black codes, a set of rules made by southerners in the similar style of the amendments.…

    • 407 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The New Jim crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness by Michelle Alexander breaks down the role that Mass incarceration has played in keeping legal racial discrimination, which we once called Jim Crow laws alive. Throughout the book Michelle Alexander explains the history behind Jim Crow laws and the American criminal justice system as they relate to each other. Alexander uses detailed history and hard facts to support her thesis that the Mass incarceration of African Americans is the governments way of reforming Jim Crow laws to fit todays time. The reason why this topic of Mass incarceration of African Americans is such an important topic to address is to preserve the future of the black community and to change the role that…

    • 824 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    The prison system and incarceration in the U.S. is an example of the expulsions which occur to those who do not fit in with the predatory formations and logics of growth in the capitalist order. Those who fall victim to mass incarceration are typically of lower social status, and in many ways, imprisonment in the U.S. is similar to the physical expulsion of “unwanted” peoples of war and areas of instability. The unbelievable exiling of 2.29 million Americans, a skewed proportion of which are minorities and of lower social status, is an example of the social and people oriented consequences of the current logics of…

    • 1665 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Decent Essays

    In this section, conclusions will be presented based on research related to the topic chosen. The connection of slavery and prison The 13th Amendment abolished slavery except when an individual becomes a convicted felon, post emancipation convict labor became increasing popular with the Southern states in hopes of restoring the slave system, African Americans were convicted of “Black Code” type crimes which often brought tougher sentencing than those of the opposite race convicted of similar crimes. Abolitionists fought against the restoration of chattel slavery, slowly prison systems solved the problem of convict leasing, by using inmates for state funded projects only.…

    • 144 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays