The New Jim Crow Quotes With Page Number
It doesn't matter how long ago your conviction occurred. Well, in my view, nothing short of a major social movement has any hope of ending mass incarceration in America. In the first instance, a focus on drug use provides the perfect pretext for increasing arrests even when violent crime rates are declining, since drug use is ubiquitous in American society. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. This includes: - Law enforcement, who receive federal grants for drug arrests. It involved a young African-American man who was about nineteen, who walked into my office one day and forever changed the way I viewed myself as a civil-rights lawyer and the system I was up against. Some states deny representation for people who earn over a certain income limit. Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. There is a movement for major drug policy reform as well as a movement for restorative justice, to shift away from a purely punitive approach to dealing with violent offenders to a more restorative one that takes seriously interests of the victim, the offender and the community as a whole. When "The New Jim Crow" came out, a decade ago, you said that you wrote it for "the person I was ten years ago. " "Martin Luther King Jr. called for us to be lovestruck with each other, not colorblind toward each other. It sends this message that you're going to jail one way or another no matter what you do, whether you stay in school or you drop out, or if you follow the rules or you don't. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern States to desegregate public facilities.
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The legal system was stacked against those arrested for drugs, as seen in the second of The New Jim Crow quotes. They have a badge; they have a law degree. You're going to jail just like your uncle, just like your father, just like your brother, just like your neighbor. If you're a schoolteacher working in a suburban school, and you come to discover that a child in your school may be struggling with drugs or have a drug abuse problem, the most likely response is not to call the police. I was familiar with the challenges associated with reforming institutions in which racial stratification is thought to be normal—the natural consequence of differences in education, culture, motivation, and, some still believe, innate ability.
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Visit the author's website →. For instance, shorter sentencing does nothing to address the prison label that follows people upon release. Eventually it became obvious. When you're born, your parent has likely already spent time behind bars, maybe behind bars at the time you make your entrance into the world.
The New Jim Crow Definition
A penal system unprecedented in world history? Mass incarceration is a massive system of racial and social control. During the period of time that our prison population quintupled, crime rates fluctuated. That's one of the biggest losses, I think, to African American families, is that people, once they left, they turned away from the South. What do we expect those [people] to do? It just means charging simple drug possession as a misdemeanor, rather than a felony. In major American cities today, more than half of working-age African-American men are either under correctional control or branded felons and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. "The rhetoric of 'law and order' was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. Here, Alexander explicitly outlines many of the rights that are denied to felons and gives readers an initial sense of how all-encompassing those denials are.
That is the path we have chosen, and it leads to a familiar place. Locking up extraordinary numbers of people from a single neighborhood means that the young people in those neighborhoods imagine that incarceration is their destiny. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as "brave and bold, " this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. In Chapter 6, the final chapter of the book, Alexander expresses guarded hope for the future. Locking all these people up has bought crime rates down. Alexander has no illusions that this work will be easy. Hasn't this been a grand success story? I would get a letter in the mail from a prisoner. He walked in my office carrying a stack of papers a couple of inches thick.
The arguments and rationalizations that have been trotted out in support of racial exclusion and discrimination in its various forms have changed and evolved, but the outcome has remained largely the same. A seismic culture shift must happen in law enforcement – black people must no longer be viewed as the enemy. Sign up for your FREE 7-day trial. One need not be formally convicted in a court of law to be subject to this shame and stigma. The kid in the 'hood who joined a gang and now carries a gun for security, because his neighborhood is frightening and unsafe? The communities where people of color live are the ones most heavily policed; their young people are the ones stopped and frisked. A bunch of us clergy have read your book, and organizing, and we're getting that energy, and we're ready to start putting pressure on public leaders. Incarceration rates, especially black incarceration rates, have soared regardless of whether crime is going up or down in any given community or the nation as a whole. SPEAKER 3: We're building a multiracial coalition in the town that I live.