Alexander illustrates how mass incarceration is the way the US has continued a racial caste system or “the New Jim Crow”. It is legalized discrimination. Incarceration is a way of excluding a large population of African Americans from a number of rights as a US citizen. Once convicted as a felon discrimination with employment, housing, education, public assistance and voting is legal. In Alexander’s writing she walks through the history of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Civil Rights then the war on drugs and mass incarceration, show how racialized social control has not ended. There were brief moments of progress for African Americans but each time the dominant white class saw it as a threat to white supremacy and a new paradigm of social control of African Americans was instigated. The dominant class became more discrete with designating “cracking down on crime” and mass incarceration as racial order. Before the end of the Civil Rights Movement those in power shifted language from segregation to law and order, forming a race neutral language attempting to hide racial bias. Rather than approach drug abuse as a medical condition and help users find treatment options the US chose to criminalize it with progressively increasing penalties. In this way racial order continues to be asserted.
I have not personally experienced racism in the way described by Alexander. But my daughter’s friend and her boyfriend are currently grappling with the criminal justice system. They are a young Latin couple who just had a baby and they have not been able to find decent jobs, so they struggle financially. This led the boyfriend to steal laundry detergent. It is not his first offense, so he is facing jail time. The individualist view would see it as his own fault. But it’s a racial and social problem, with employment and pay discrimination as part of the problem, as well as a biased criminal justice system.
How would you envision a reformation of the criminal justice system? Should the current method of incarceration be eliminated?
Sylvia's blog 
Hi Sylvia,
I found it interesting learning about the situation with your daughter’s friend and her boyfriend. I agree that having to be involved in an act of stealing has racial and social implications. As I have learned in my Education classes, these issues have a web of different interconnected factors at the macrolevel that needs to be taken into consideration. For example, there may be policies, school, family, friends, among many other factors that play into this issue.
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