{"id":6005,"date":"2025-06-03T00:32:39","date_gmt":"2025-06-03T00:32:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-a050-american-government-summer-2025\/?p=6005"},"modified":"2025-06-03T00:32:48","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T00:32:48","slug":"mark-castro-discussion-2-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-a050-american-government-summer-2025\/2025\/06\/03\/mark-castro-discussion-2-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Castro Discussion 2.1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In <em>The New Jim Crow<\/em>, Michelle Alexander challenges the common belief that high incarceration rates in the U.S. are due to high crime rates, especially drug crime. Instead, she argues that mass incarceration is largely the result of targeted political policies specifically, the War on Drugs which disproportionately affect poor communities of color. According to Alexander, this &#8220;war&#8221; has been used as a tool for social control, continuing a long legacy of racial oppression that began with slavery, continued through Jim Crow segregation, and was rebranded during the Civil Rights era with calls for &#8220;law and order.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>She highlights that the Reagan administration, in particular, played a key role in shaping public perception. On page 5, she explains how officials hired media staff to intentionally hype the emergence of crack cocaine in inner-city neighborhoods. This campaign helped generate public fear and support for harsh drug laws. But Alexander points out that drug use occurs across all racial groups at similar rates\u2014yet people of color, especially Black Americans, are far more likely to be arrested, convicted, and sentenced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is why she argues that racial disparities in incarceration rates cannot be explained by drug crime rates. The real issue is not who uses or sells drugs, but how law enforcement chooses to respond\u2014and who they choose to police most aggressively. The system was designed to criminalize certain communities while appearing colorblind on the surface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When Alexander says the American penal system has become a form of social control \u201cunparalleled in world history,\u201d I understand this to mean that the scale and structure of U.S. incarceration is not just about punishing crime. It\u2019s about managing and marginalizing a specific population mainly poor Black and Brown Americans. Much like the example from British history where gin (a drink of the poor) was outlawed while whiskey (a drink of the wealthy) was not, drug laws in the U.S. criminalize behaviors most associated with disadvantaged groups while allowing similar behaviors among the privileged to go unpunished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Alexander\u2019s work made me think critically about how laws are written and enforced and who they are really designed to serve or control.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander challenges the common belief that high incarceration rates in the U.S. are due to high crime rates, especially drug crime. Instead, she argues that mass incarceration is largely the result of targeted political policies specifically, the War on Drugs which disproportionately affect poor communities of color. According to&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10668,"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":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discussion-board-2-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-a050-american-government-summer-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-a050-american-government-summer-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-a050-american-government-summer-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-a050-american-government-summer-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10668"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-a050-american-government-summer-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6005"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-a050-american-government-summer-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6006,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-a050-american-government-summer-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6005\/revisions\/6006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-a050-american-government-summer-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-a050-american-government-summer-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-a050-american-government-summer-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}