Crime has often been used as a form of social control by defining certain people and behaviors as dangerous this is especially the case around poor and marginalized communities. Laws and policing practices tend to focus more heavily on these groups. This makes them more likely to be arrested and punished even when crime rates are similar across different social classes. This creates a cycle where some communities are constantly under surveillance while others are largely protected from the same level of scrutiny. Over time crime slowly becomes a way to justify inequality since the people labeled as criminals are unfortunitly treated as less deserving of rights and opportunities.
Michelle Alexander argues that mass incarceration functions as a modern form of segregation. Instead of openly racist laws the system now uses the label \u201ccriminal\u201d to exclude people especially Black Americans from full participation in society. After incarceration, individuals often face barriers to jobs, housing, and voting, which keeps them in a second-class status. Alexander shows that this system is legal and normalized which makes it harder to see as discriminatory. Together these ideas explain how crime and punishment help maintain social and racial hierarchies in the U.S.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Crime has often been used as a form of social control by defining certain people and behaviors as dangerous this is especially the case around poor and marginalized communities. Laws and policing practices tend to focus more heavily on these groups. This makes them more likely to be arrested and punished even when crime rates…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10873,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"portfolio_post_id":0,"portfolio_citation":"","portfolio_annotation":"","openlab_post_visibility":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discussion-board-4-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2025-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2025-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2025-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2025-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10873"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2025-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12184"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2025-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12185,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2025-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12184\/revisions\/12185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2025-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2025-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2025-introduction-to-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}