1. I agree with M. Alexandar’s claims. She claims that so many people are sent to jail in the U.S today is deeply wrong. Michelle Alexandar stated in, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, “While it is true that the publicity surrounding crack cocaine led to a dramatic increase in funding for the drug war (as well as to sentencing policies that greatly exacerbated racial disparities in incarceration rates), there is no truth to the notion that the War on Drugs was launched in response to crack cocaine.” What she shows in this example is how America’s mass incarceration can’t be explained accurately but it isn’t true that most people go to jail because of crime that is being committed. Another reason why she is correct is that she didn’t agree with how people got arrested for “drug charges” which technically isn’t a crime because it doesn’t inhibit criminal behavior. Due to the mainstream media circulating the crack cocaine racist images and people of color getting named called because the people of color were the targets during the time the drugs were being disturbed in their neighborhoods. The “War on Drugs” was a very talked-about topic during the 1980s, since their main focus was to get the people of color involved as much, even the CIA was responsible for putting crack cocaine out on the streets and later getting distributed by other sellers to get the people of color in the poor community incarcerated.
  2. Michelle Alexandar stated how the racial disparities in the rates of incarceration, “Can’t be explained by the rates of drug crimes because “These stark racial disparities cannot be explained by rates of drug crime. Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.10 If there are significant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color. That is not what one would guess, however, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, which are overflowing with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men. And in major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. These young men are part of a growing undercast, permanently locked up and locked out of mainstream society.” This example shows how not only the people of color are guilty of drug crimes but the entire race of humans including, ” Whites, Blacks, Latin, and Asian Americans.” Anyone worldwide can be a potential drug user, drug addict, or possibly a drug dealer. Their main targets are also the minorities and people of color in the criminal justice system just because of their skin color and are more prone to getting incarcerated because the criminal justice system is racist and it can’t be that way because drugs don’t discriminate based on a race because they can be used by anyone.
  3. The phrase, “The American penal system has emerged as a system of social control unparalleled in world history” is based on how prisons aren’t places where we have any control, the criminal justice sends people to prison who break the law or hurt others physically or killed. Michelle Alexandar made a point on how a prison is a place where society is controlled by criminal justice and where people get unequal treatment based on different ethnicities.

One thought on “Discussion Board 2.1”

  1. Good points on Q1 and Q2, Madeline. Q3 I don’t think you answered the question. What could be M. ALexander implying by calling prisons places of social control? How do you make sense of the concept of “social control”?

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