Jim Crow Essay

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The New Caste System: Mass Incarceration of African Americans

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander expresses her main argument as being that the foundation of Jim Crow has not ended, but has been justified through the context of the United States’ criminal justice system. Alexander claims that African Americans who are labeled as criminals allow for the old ways of discrimination to legally continue. The New Jim Crow system that has been redesigned in America leaves a lot of people with criminal backgrounds jobless and stuck in second-class status, a result of strategic rules and regulations the federal government has placed into effect. This new caste system is created by the mass incarceration of African Americans, who have been placed in prison and are then set free. They have no voice. They cannot vote, they cannot buy a home, they cannot find jobs, they have no access to public assistance, and they cannot have a normal life. They are unable to protest against the injustices of this system because they have no rights. The mass incarceration was justified with the War on Drugs campaign, which was a covert way to discriminate against the black population of the United States by creating a movement toward eliminating the illegal drug use before it was even a problem. The CIA admits that after the War on Drugs was proclaimed, the political affiliations with guerrilla armies in Nicaragua allowed them to illegally smuggle crack cocaine into the inner cities to help fund their war. The problem is not the fact that many African Americans are living on the margins of society, but by the appealing to those of the white lower class, which were in direct competition for the same jobs and living conditions.
It is interesting to note that the illegal drug use in the nation at the time of the declaration of The War on Drugs was declining and the general public was not aware there was a drug problem in their neighborhoods. In the 1970’s, the manufacturing jobs were being moved to the suburbs, and those jobs were hard to get access to due to lack of personal and public transportation. Many of these jobs were also moved overseas to utilize cheaper labor costs for the corporations and company owners. With the lack of legitimately paying jobs for those African Americans stuck in the inner cities, the drug dealing of crack cocaine became an option to support family and lifestyles. Putting this together along with the confession that the CIA prevented local crime agencies from investigating and stopping the smuggling of crack cocaine into the United States, and the inner cities, begs the question if this act was deliberate in facilitating this new caste
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