Mass Incarceration Analysis

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s argument that Mass Incarceration is, metaphorically, the new Jim Crow is extremely useful because it sheds light on the difficult problem a system of racial and social control that is prevalent in the United States today. Although I agree with Alexander generally, I cannot accept her overriding assumption that Mass Incarceration is the only system of oppression contributing to the new system of oppression that has been emerging since the so-called end of the Jim Crow Era. I believe that the topic of Racial Housing Segregation and Discrimination is of equal importance to the issue of systematic racism as Mass Incarceration. While the Legal Segregation has been abolished, Racial Housing Segregation still
For example: A colored citizen forced to live in an area of racial housing segregation becomes a felon, only to be released from jail and further marginalized into areas of racial housing segregation. Areas of racial housing segregation have the highest incarceration rates. In a special report from the Boston Indicators Project in Partnership with MassINC and the Massachusetts Criminal Justice Reform Coalition titled, “The Geography of Incarceration”, researchers investigated the geography of incarceration in Boston as part of a federally funded experiment. An interesting aspect of their findings is: “Many people of color live in Boston neighborhoods with such highly concentrated rates of incarceration that nearly every street—in some cases every other building— contains a resident who has been incarcerated” (Foreman et al, 5). This means that the colored racially segregated neighborhoods in Boston hold immensely high rates of incarceration compared to their non-colored counterparts. These findings demonstrate that the government has enough evidence to prove that their systems of mass incarceration are using discrimination for unjust targeting, yet they have not altered their policies to rectify these issues. Michelle Alexander even comments on the vicious cycle, stating, “Youth of color who might have escaped their ghetto
In other words, prisons are predominately made up of people of color and, like ghettos, are made to ensure exclusion of minorities from society. Sociologist and Research Associate at the Earl Warren Legal Institute, Loic Wacquant, explains the likeness best in the scholarly article Deadly symbiosis When ghetto and prison meet and mesh as: “Specifying the workings of the ghetto as mechanism of ethnoracial closure and control makes readily visible its structural and functional kinship with the prison: the ghetto is a manner of ‘ethnoracial prison’ in that it encloses a stigmatized population which evolves within it its distinctive organizations and culture, while the prison functions as a ‘judicial ghetto’ relegating individuals disgraced by criminal conviction to a secluded space harboring the parallel social relations and cultural norms that make up the ‘society of captives’”(Wacquant 103). In essence, Wacquant is arguing that there is a resulting symbiosis between ghettos and prisons that has been made to further the separation of Black Americans from society. Wacquant’s idea of a close relationship between ghettos and prisons is worth mentioning due because it fuses the important roles that Mass Incarceration and Racial Housing Segregation and Discrimination play in part of racial separation, and gives reason to why