The New Jim Crow Summary

The New Jim Crow brings a new constructive agenda to understand the sources of mass incarceration among black men in America. The book goes down a timeline that explains the birth and the end of slavery that ended in the civil war, then eventually led to jim crow laws which kept blacks in a lower caste system, which inhibited the rights and privileges that non- blacks had access to. Once the jim crow era ended, the storm wasn’t over and a new caste system erupted. A large dramatic of black male incarceration rates increase because the war on drug’s started. The book explains additional legal negative impacts that push forward to keep a constant state on the incarceration rates of black men such as police discretion, racism/colorism, legalized …show more content…
When the war on drugs was introduced, the police had a major role in the contribution to the mass incarceration of black males with the support of the government. This led to increased motivation to search for drugs by using traffic stops as a cover up, which also increased racial profiling because the black community was the target not whites. The pressure to round up as many people as possible to clean the streets, can cause police to use unethical fast and easy tactics. These intertwine with the flaw of the 4th amendment, which doesn’t protect individual’s 100 percent because police can lie and state, there was a probable cause or had a suspicion to search. This becomes a problem with individual rights vs the common good of the people because blacks can be taken advantage of. It increases the likelihood of police brutality erupting on the streets and in traffic stops in the search and crack down on drugs. By the government giving the Byrne program grant, military equipment and swat teams shows discretion was thrown into the police hands and they had to use those …show more content…
Powdered cocaine was commonly used in the white communities and crack cocaine in the black communities. Powdered cocaine carried less jail and more likely probation time then crack cocaine. In my opinion, this show some sentence disparity occurring discreetly because they are both illegal and very dangerous street drugs that are derived from the same source, but what was used in the black community is deemed worse and had harsher punishment. I doubt with the high numbers of black men being affected by this there wasn’t any concern because black men were the target in the first place in this crime control drug