Essay On Mass Incarceration

In the United States, racism is a problem that is rooted in a struggle for power amongst people groups, and as the struggle has progressed, it has permeated almost every aspect of the American life. In the early years of the nation, the presence of slavery made it easy to point out the evils of racism, and even in after emancipation, Jim Crow and segregation laws made it evident that the issue continued to pervade society. However, following the Civil Rights era, inherent acts of racism began to dwindle. Today, racism has been institutionalized and can be seen in issues like mass incarceration, which targets African American populations. Sociologist Max Weber would have believed the issue of racism and mass incarceration to be directly related to the efforts that white Americans took to maintain the power they possessed through their class, status, and parties.
In his publication titled “The Distribution of Power Within the Political Community:
When Civil Rights activists began to protest and exhibit civil disobedience, conservatives would depict their actions as criminal rather than political and would accuse federal courts of “excessive ‘lenience’ toward lawlessness, thereby contributing to the spread of crime” (Alexander 41). This shift away from explicitly racist rhetoric toward more neutral terms only continued as the Civil Rights Movement passed and as blatant racism became politically