1) The stakes of our project are the lives of African-American women who are put behind bars for non-violent offenses, specifically drug offenses. We are directing our podcast towards law students who are looking to become public defenders and district attorneys. With that being said, the average public defender and district attorney are not familiar with the lives of the people they prosecute and defend. Nor are most of them familiar with the hardships drug offenses cause African-American families because of The War on Drugs. Students are taught to value numbers, statistics and efficiency in school rather than people. If law students take this sense of motivation into their practice, black women who commit drug offenses will be seen as another badge on a prosecutor’s jacket, rather than a person who is being taken away from their family. The …show more content…
This reading allowed me to realize that all scholarly work does not best represent the people it is meant to cover, and that personal accounts have validation because of lived experience. This validated the stories of African-American women who are affected by the incarceration system. I consulted "Ferguson v. City of Charleston, South Carolina: "Fetal Abuse," Drug Testing, and the Fourth Amendment" as well. This reading was critical in my Wiki article, and helped me use factual evidence to discuss The War on Drugs, by talking about how systematic racism plays a role in black women being sent to jail, specifically for their urine samples being drug tested without their consent. I also consulted a video of a mother who successfully escaped the cycle of poverty and drug use. Her children either ended up in college, or the Marines, and as a success story, her major recommendation is that drug use needs to be treated as an illness. This backs up my proposal to decriminalize it and treat in in drug treatment facilities rather that
Women convicted of “other property offenses” – a category of crimes that includes arson, receiving stolen property and breaking and entering — received shorter prison sentences. • Black female defendants were, in some ways, treated differently than white female defendants. Black women were assigned higher bond amounts and were more likely to be sent to prison than white women. Women of both races were equally likely to be released prior to
He claims the prejudices of the judicial system handed out mandatory sentencing for those who used their constitutional right to have a trial by jury. The author builds a relationship with the audience by using Pathos in order to compel them to recognize the urgency to change the current law. Girault explains the failing logic of the law on page 225, he states that communities were to be made safer and instead of targeting petty crimes the focus would be to bring down kingpins, however after three decades of the SRA it still was a failure. Girault defines the sentencing reform act as discriminatory and states that minorities are hugely effected by this law and states ”Black people are overwhelming charged, convicted and sentenced at a higher rate to federal crimes since the passage of the Sentencing Reform Act.” (Girault 228).
It provides you with plenty of new information regarding our justice system. Alexander uses information and statistics to support her arguments throughout the text. I agree with all the points that Michelle Alexander was making throughout the printed work. After reading this book, I have been more knowledgeable of the many challenges that past offenders have when returning to the community after being incarcerated. This book forces readers to address racial issues that we all see and hear about, but do not like to like to discuss.
Because of these rules that law enforcement officials have created, mass incarceration rates have sky rocketed. When the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education (1995) released their survey, the noticed that 95 percent of people described an African American person to be a typical drug user and only five percent of people described the typical drug consumer to be of another race. Nonetheless, the people in the 95 percent range showed cognitive bias as a result of only 15 percent of African Americans in 1995 were drug users. Where as, the majority of the White race consisted of drug users. Alexander responds by saying, “There is no reason to believe that the survey results would have been any different if police officers or prosecutors have been the respondents” (2011, p. 106).
According to The University of Michigan's law education, African Americans are seven times more likely than white Americans to be falsely convicted of serious crimes due to their race (law.umich.edu). Bryan Stevenson who is a human rights lawyer and author wrote the memoir by the name of Just Mercy. This piece focuses on the idea that the criminal justice system is discriminatory. In this memoir, he defends and fights for citizens to protect their rights as a person. Bryan Stevenson beautifully utilizes strong word choice, repetition, and emotional appeal to emphasize and persuade the readers that the efforts to fight institutional cruelty and raise the most vulnerable to a “higher ground” is what matters most.
We live in a society where ethnic minorities are target for every minimal action and/or crimes, which is a cause to be sentenced up to 50 years in jail. African Americans and Latinos are the ethnic minorities with highest policing crimes. In chapter two of Michelle Alexander’s book, The Lockdown, we are exposed to the different “crimes” that affects African American and Latino minorities. The criminal justice system is a topic discussed in this chapter that argues the inequality that people of color as well as other Americans are exposed to not knowing their rights. Incarceration rates, unreasonable suspicions, and pre-texts used by officers are things that play a huge role in encountering the criminal justice system, which affects the way
Ayelet Waldman’s Daughter’s Keeper brings to light the injustice of the American legal system in regards to drug related crimes. When Olivia Goodman is thrown into an unforgiving world of trials, courtrooms, and mandatory minimums, readers are faced with the unfairness of the American justice system. It isn’t fair that that Olivia receive a four-year sentence, while Jorge, a man more culpable, more at fault receive only three years. It isn’t fair that Gabriel Contreras, a known criminal, gets to cut a deal with the DEA and end up with $3,560,633 and no jail time, while Treyvon’s unnamed cousin gets twenty years for merely introducing people. It isn’t fair that someone marginally involved in a crime be punished more severely than the others.
But one problem that African Americans still face is the unfairness of the American prison and criminal justice system. The United States holds the title as the highest prisoner population in the world. With African Americans account for less than 12% of the United States, they still make up a large portion of the U.S prison population. Black people are incarcerated at higher rates than whites, despite being equally susceptible to committing crimes as whites. The American prison and criminal justice system has a long history of racial discrimination towards African Americans which can be supported through examples of unjust laws, disproportionate incarceration rates among different races, the and cases of African Americans being unfairly persecuted for crimes they didn’t commit.
In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in The Era of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, she begins by points out the underlying problem in our Criminal Justice system. The problem being prioritizing the control of those in this racial caste rather than focusing on reasonable punishment and efforts to deter crime. Alexander begins by speaking of her experience as a civil rights lawyer and what soon became her priority after seeing a poster that mentioned how the war on drugs is the new jim crow when it comes to the application and outcome of it. As Alexander points out the correlation between the war on drugs and it being the new jim crow, she discusses the mass incarceration that is prevalent in our society and the number of African American
Women of color are the most targeted, prosecuted, and imprisoned women in the country and rapidly increasing their population within the prison systems. According to Nicholas Freudenberg, 11 out of every 1000 women will end up incarcerated in their lifetime, the average age being 35, while only five of them are white, 15 are Latinas, and 36 are black. These two groups alone make up 70 percent of women in prison, an astonishing rate compared to the low percentage comprise of within the entire female population in the country (1895). Most of their offenses are non-violent, but drug related, and often these women come from oppressive and violent backgrounds, where many of their struggles occurred directly within the home and from their own family.
Alexander focuses on how African American communities have become more vulnerable to the arrests. Authorities will target these communities even though this is not where the crime is happening. Lastly, many people are labeled ‘felons’ for life, even though they have only committed one victimless crime. Michelle Alexander summarizes her opinion by saying, “We have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it.” Even though America has taken many small steps to move forward from segregation, black individuals are locked up behind bars and will struggle for the rest of their lives to escape from the ‘felon’ title.
Synopsis In the introduction, Michelle Alexander (2010) introduces herself and expresses her passion about the topic of how the criminal justice system accomplishes racial hierarchy here in the United States. In chapter 1 of The New Jim Crow, Alexander (2010) suggests that the federal government can no longer be trusted to make any effort to enforce black civil rights legislation, especially when the Drug War is aimed at racial and ethnic minorities. In response to revolts formed between black slaves and white indentured servants, rich whites extended special privileges to their indentured servants that drove a wedge between them and the slaves that successfully stopped the revolts.
This major disparity represents the larger treatment of Black people, because the prosecution would not be so harsh unless this harsh treatment was deemed acceptable the justice system. These statistics are not random. Regardless of the circumstances of each individual case, the common theme among all of these cases are the implicit bias that target the Black population. The importance of these statistics goes beyond the statistics itself. The Court established these statistics as “valid,” but the court “insisted that evidence of conscious, racial bias in McClesky’s individual
Her central thesis is that mass incarceration is “The New Jim Crow,” or the new system of control used by the government to uphold racial class in the U.S. This book will be helpful to my research because it directly discusses the topic of race and the criminal justice system. Amnesty International. (2003). United States of America: Death by discrimination
Buzzy, G. (2011). Presentation: Criminal Justice Introduction. Lynchburg, VA, USA. Cassidy, R. M. (2015). Promoting Diversity in the Criminal Justice System. Boston Bar Journal:Spring 2015 Vol.