1. M. Alexander claims that the main explanation of why so many people are sent to jail in the U.S. today is deeply wrong. Explain her argument by referring to the various examples she mentions to backup her point. (see p. 1-2)
In the reading “The New Jim Crow”, M. Alexander expresses the mainstream view on mass incarceration is incorrect. In the reading she expresses that many people believes that the war on drugs is in response to the rise of crack cocaine. She indicates that many people also believes that the crack cocaine crisis was mainly in black neighborhoods and the black and brown people are the ones selling it as well. She combats this by stating ” 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. A few years after the drug war was declared, crack began to spread rapidly in the poor black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and later emerged in cities across the country.” This shows how can a “war” be created if there is nothing to war against. In the reading she expresses that during the time President Reagan announced this war on dugs, drug usage was declining. So the question is what would cause him to announce a war on something that is not there or rather a problem at the time? Then a few years later a crack crisis explodes in black neighborhoods.
M. Alexander then expresses how people of all colors uses drugs. But apparently it was seen as a crisis only in black and brown neighborhoods. In the reading, she shines light on the media for helping to push this idea of war on drugs in black and brown neighborhoods. M. Alexander talks about how President Reagan used the media to display things such as black crack dealers, black crack whores and black crack babies to push this idea that it was a huge crisis in the black neighborhoods. Further-less to say, laws and policies was then created to crackdown on the drugs. So now that people have an image in their minds that the crack crisis was so abundant in minority communities mostly minority people was being arrested. People were being arrested for selling and using. This is how the mass incarceration began to happen.
2. Why is it that racial disparities in the rates of incarceration “cannot be explained by rates of drug crimes”?
M. Alexander states in the reading “most people assume the War on Drugs was launched in response to the crisis caused by crack cocaine in inner-city neighborhoods. This view holds that the racial disparities in drug convictions and sentences, as well as the rapid explosion of the prison population, reflect nothing more than the government’s zealous—but benign—efforts to address rampant drug crime in poor, minority neighborhoods.” Do to this assumption that the war on drugs was launched to address the crack cocaine crisis in inner-city neighborhoods does not show the rate of drug crimes as a whole. The focus was directed to the black and brown communities opposed to all communities. People were being arrested not for only selling drugs but for also using or rather have small possessions of drugs. At this point people are being arrested for non-violent drug crimes.
3. How do you understand the phrase: “the American penal system has emerged as a system of social control unparalleled in world history.”?
My understanding of the above phrase is the American penal system uses punishment as a form to control human behavior and to display what social norms should look like. In the the reading M. Alexander talks about how punishment is no where close to actual crime patterns. In the reading she states “between 1960 and 1990, for example, official crime rates in Finland, Germany, and the United States were close to identical. Yet the U.S. incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate fell by 60 percent, and the German rate was stable in that period.” This shows how different the American Penal system handles crimes so differently than other countries with similar crime rate.
