Summary: The New Jim Crow

Literature Review
The New Jim Crow
PAD5043

I must say that I may have been completely wrong about the state of diversity in our country. I have worked in public service for literally my entire working life (30 years) and in public safety for all of it. I have worked in inner city areas and subsidized housing plans. But my opinion has been similar to that of most white Americans; that people of color do not want a hand up, they want a hand out. Not to be derogatory but that’s what I concluded based on what I experienced. That minorities, especially African-Americans, were using their race and situation to justify their poor choices. After reading The New Jim Crow, by Michelle
Alexander does make a very strong argument for her premise, I found her most troubling argument to be that of the underlying conspiracy by whites, particularly the establishment, against people of color. Ms. Alexander argues that the birth of mass incarceration began in the late 1960’s after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act removed most of the segregational laws in place at the time. According to Alexander, in the search for another method of race control, the establishment sought to allay the fears of rising crime rates with more stringent penalties for violent crime and particularly drug possession; which correlated to the increase in violent crime (Alexander, 2010). This was the path to the future “war on drugs” and the spark that led to the mass incarceration solution. Forman, in his piece challenging Alexander’s analogy, alleges that the crime rates the FBI was reporting were not, as Alexander alleges, misreported; that the street crime rate did quadruple in the years from 1959-1971 (Forman, 2012). Forman also counters Alexander’s conspiracy argument with the fact that it was black activists who were clamoring most for stiffer punishment for convicted criminals, as a way of trying to improve the deplorable living conditions in the inner city areas (Foreman, 2012). If black activists were the group most adamant about increasing sentences as a crime deterrent, how could there be a
One such initiative that has resulted because of her work is the Campaign to End the New Jim Crow (CENJC). This initiative was formed in Harlem, New York during October of 2011 and is a coalition of several racial injustice prevention groups. The group’s mission is to raise awareness and about mass incarceration and institutional racism, with the goal of building a grassroots, bottom-up movement that challenges the racist ideologies that have helped produce these conditions (CENJC, 2014). The groups vision is to foster a "movement that is committed to ending mass incarceration entirely and to push for a fundamental shift from a punitive model to a healing and transformative model of justice--a model that does not criminalize people for public health problems like drug addiction and does not criminalize poverty" (CENJC, 2014). Since it’s beginning, the group has developed and implemented several outreach programs, committed to advocacy and uncovered numerous incidents of racial injustice within the local area, pursuing their investigation and demanding responsibility (CENJC, 2014). While there is much work to do, the CENJC is collaborating with similar groups throughout the country to address and remedy the disease of mass incarceration and racial justice