Alexander The New Jim Crow Analysis

Alexander focuses a chapter on the silent truth of mass incarceration of blacks across the country, attempting to compare it to the actual Jim Crow era while pointing out the differences. The parallels between the systems of control seem obvious while there are significant differences that Alexander highlights and tries to shrink, such as the assumption that Jim crow was race-based, when in fact laws were race-neutral but were set up in a way to make it seem otherwise. The argument stands with the parallel between Jim Crow and the drug war. Alexander says that laws having to do with the sale and use of drugs are supposedly “race neutral” but enforced in a “highly discriminatory fashion.” She argues that the drug war is set up to target African …show more content…
CNN and the New York Times fail to come out and recognize it as well. The numbers are there; mass incarceration of black males are freakishly close to those in the age of slavery. Missing black men and unmarried women with a 26% sex gap is not because of pure laziness, but because there are under control of the criminal system, according to Alexander. Her method of separating blacks and whites is clear as if white crime is completely ignored, but does not provide numbers of how much drug crime is actually committed within the two races. The main parallels “mapped” between Jim Crow and mass incarceration are the historic origins, where white elites want to exploit adversity of poor whites purely for economic/political gain, legalized discrimination by branding blacks as felons, exclusion from juries, being ignored by courthouses, racial segregation, and as mentioned before, symbolic production of race. To make a just argument, there are a number of significant differences between the two. The public hostility between the races are not there the way they used to be, rather there is racial indifference instead. The fact that there are white victims makes it seem like there is equality even if the …show more content…
Mass incarceration is looked at in a little more detail, specifying the immorality and dehumanizing of prisoners by deputies and throughout the process as a whole, helping to make a visualization of the adversity that the disproportionate majority of black criminals face. The judicial system is unfair in a way that laws cannot defend, while those in court without experience have a hard time defending themselves and are humiliated. What Irwin explains as far as degradation is not something that goes away; it most likely stays with the criminals forever just as they are branded as such on paper after they are let