1 – Michelle Alexander explains that the main explanation of why so many people are sent to jail in the U.S. today which is the drug war against drug crime in the black poor neighborhood, is deeply wrong. A) She stated that President Ronald Reagan officially announced the current drug war in 1982, before crack became an issue in the media or a crisis in poor black neighborhoods. B) Per M. Alexander war on Drugs was part of a genocidal plan by the government to destroy black people in the United States. C) Also she argues that drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase, especially among people of color, while studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates, however when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, they are overflowing with black and brown drug offenders. D) According to her text sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns.

2- Racial disparities in the rates of incarceration cannot be explained by drug crimes because studies have shown that people of all color use and sell illegal drugs at the similar rates. However, in the prisons and jails there were mostly 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. In major cities wracked by the drug war, 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.

3- The phrase: “The American penal system has emerged as a system of social control unparalleled in world history” means to me that the penal system in the US has become a system of racial control in term of labeling black men with crimes and incarcerated them. These people are locked up for a long period of time that surpassed most of other countries in the world. When they get out of jails, they lose most of their rights and are discriminated. This is the penal system used to control black people.