Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy... Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.
Cotton’s story illustrates, in many respects, the old adage ‘The more things change, the more they remain the same’... In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind... Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.
So begins the introduction to legal scholar and former litigator Michelle Alexander’s extraordinary book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Jim Crow has been praised for documenting in compelling detail how the current historic levels of incarceration in the United States have disproportionately targeted communities of color and function as a means of controlling people of color, just as slavery and Jim Crow did in their time.
Alexander acknowledges that many people find this argument hard to believe in the “age of colorblindness.” Many Americans wanted to see President Obama’s historic election as the final hopeful sign our nation has moved “past race,” and many believe the millions of other Black Americans who are imprisoned and disenfranchised are in that condition only because of individual bad choices.
When we are confronted with the facts that our nation’s incarceration rates have quintupled over the last several decades and the United States has the largest prison population and imprisons the highest numbers of its minority population in the world, Alexander says many Americans simply accept the prevailing myth that “there is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime rates. Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of rampant crime. We’re told that the reason so many black and brown men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent, second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys.” But as The New Jim Crow argues, the data show this is simply not true.
While incarceration may be rooted for some in poor individual choices, the glaring racial disparities in searches, arrests, convictions, and sentencing for the same crimes suggest our nation doesn’t treat everyone’s poor choices equally. What has skyrocketed over the years are not our nation’s crime rates—which have actually fallen below the international norm—but the number of drug convictions in the U.S. as a result of our declared “War on Drugs.” Many people assume next that of course Black criminals are being incarcerated for drug crimes at record rates because they are the ones committing them. In some states, Blacks comprise 80-90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison.
But The New Jim Crow painstakingly outlines how media and political strategies manufactured the popular images of the War on Drugs as an assault on scary, violent Black male drug dealers, when in fact “[s]tudies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. If there are significant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color.” Meanwhile, as The New Jim Crow clearly shows, the dramatic increases in mandatory sentence lengths even for nonviolent offenses and the far-reaching consequences that come with being classified as a felon even after a sentence is completed have made incarceration today a historically punitive form of social control and social death—at exactly the same time as record numbers of African Americans are being confined.
This is how mass incarceration functions as the new Jim Crow, with predictably destructive results for Black communities and families. For those of us concerned about our nation’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline® crisis, this latest danger threatens to overwhelm and destroy millions of our children’s futures. By identifying it and giving it a name, Michelle Alexander has placed a critical spotlight on a reality our nation can’t afford to deny. We ignore her careful research and stay silent about mass incarceration’s devastating effects at our own and our nation’s peril.
Follow Marian Wright Edelman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ChildDefender
Would anyone venture to guess which political party shields these fascists under their wing? Hint: (It is not the wing on the left).
This is about oppressing an entire social economic class of people whose first and only crime is poverty.
The white minded exploitation of Jim Crow tactics uses the penal system as a means of criminalizing poverty and the prison system as the vehicle of their enslavement.
For all their pretense and talk of “No Big Government”, most of our tax dollars go to the enforcement of their fascist policies and politics.
This is about the new ways the Republicans are extending Jim Crow techniques to disenfranchise voters beyond just race.
They are targeting all students because they tend to vote Democratic party. So they are demanding ID students are less likely to have to deny them voter registration.
They are targeting the poor.
They are targeting first time voters.
In Texas the only ones exempt from the registration restrictions are the elderly and those with concealed gun carry permits. Why? Because those two demographics consistently vote Republican.
Pretty soon Jim Crow won't just be about blacks or felons. It will be anyone who disagrees with the Republican party.
All felons are losing their voting rights. Blacks are not the only group that this is affecting. They are however the only group whining about the poor poor felons.
Students, first time voters and the poor are not being targetted by those wanting ID's to be shown before voting. The only people being "Targetted" are those wishing to commit voter fraud.
The same groups that you mentioned, students and the poor, have absolutely no problem showing ID to cash a Welfare Check or get a student discount. On the other hand it's soooooo hard to pull that little plastic ID out and hand it to the poll worker.
Face it, the Democractic Party is heavily invested in voter fraud. They appreciate the young man that will go vote in 5 different precints for their candidates. With more and more elections being decided by a handful of votes it's clear that the Dems love having every vote whether or not it's legally cast.
Do you remember when Eliot Spitzer wanted to give illegal aliens the exact same Driver's License as citizens (this was supported by Hillary BTW)? A New York Driver's License is all that you need to get a voter ID card and register in this state. There's simliar schemes all over the US but you won't hear about them because you're media choices are limited to HopeyChangey news sources.
We all agree sex offenders are really really bad and deserve all kinds of special punishments... I do too. However is a 16 yr old boy that receives a nude picture from his 16yr girlfriend is not exactly what I had in mind when discussing what should happen to sex offenders. That 16yr old is now a sex offender for life.
The same is true when speaking of convicted felons. A kid gets caught with 2 small bags of pot in his possession and no guns or weapons were found.
This kid will face multiple felony charges.
1) possession with intent to distribute.
2)If he was anywhere near a school when caught... potential offense multiplier
3) possession of paraphernalia.
This kid is not poor but can not come up with the cash to get a lawyer to take the case.
This kid now faces potential jail time, record, extended probation.
If for any reason the financial part isn't met then again charges would be lowered until either the money is collected or time has been served.
This happens to all races, but there is no denying the ratios prove the discriminatory nature of the drug laws.
If it was someone in your family you might better understand the problem.
This is another way the poor of all races are disenfranchised and marginalized.
Informative book that attacks newspeak...
Jail is not a good housing solution.
He shouldn't be carrying pot! It is UNLAWFUL! Excuse, Blame, Excuse, Blame, Excuse, Blame.......it never ends. Are you honestly trying to tell me that I, as society or "whitey", put those 2 bags of pot in the kid's hand? Or that I have constructed unfair laws that target him? Ridiculous!
I work with underprivileged kids, of all races, every week. Teens and Preteens. There is not ONE that believes it is within the law to possess drugs. The people like you, that make excuses for these kids, are the biggest roadblock to their personal success.
Amazing people will think spending for jails is great, but complain at the tops of their lungs if the exact same amount was put into the community for training, food, shelter, schools.
All one has to do is to mention something is racist... even with overwhelming data that proves the problem, idealogical fundamentalist come out of the woodwork to proclaim racism is dead. You can keep saying it, but the numbers will not go away.
If you care to actually open your mind to possible solutions instead of status quo you might learn something. Try reading this book. In your position it could be a good thing.
Anyone can recover from addiction, no one can recover from a record.
Not making excuses, simply asking for guardrails for the kids instead of a guillotine.
Sounds like your war cry is " off with their heads".
That's what happens when you are convicted of a felony. Are you proposing different laws for different races???
Nixon's Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman wrote in his diary in 1969, "[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognized this while not appearing to." That was corroborated in an interview with Nixon's other top aide, John EhrlichmanÂ, in 1996 by Dan Baum in preparation for his book "Smoke and Mirrors". During that interview, John Ehrlichman said, "Look, we understood we couldn't make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue for the Nixon White House that we couldn't resist it."
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A major component of any jurisprudence system in providing justice to the offender is deterrence to further crime by the criminal (upon release) and other potential criminals. It is clear in the USA, with the abundant statistics from various parts of the country, that incarceration is no longer a deterrence.
System of incarceration even punishes the wrong persons. Incarceration punishes the innocent family, depriving them of a care-giver and / or bread-winner. Incarceration also punishes the society, due to the high cost of incarceration and support of their family, which has to be paid by the community.
In today's era of federal budget cuts and tax-payer revolt, we need to come up with other alternatives to incarceration. Or bring back in part the good-old (but internationally still widely practiced) and effective system of corporal punishment.
Poor folks were just stupid to get born here rather than in Europe.