Reference no: EM13138186

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander that all people make mistakes. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world. The book’s title refers to the author’s view of a new system of racial and social control imposed upon African Americans, created by the current state of mass incarceration that operates in a similar manner as the “old” Jim Crow system of rules, laws and customs that locked African Americans into permanent second-class status. Because of the “war on drugs” and “tough on crime” initiatives established years ago, Alexander argues, blacks are being incarcerated at a grossly disproportionate rate to white Americans and with much harsher sentences for first-time drug offenses. Those growing up in middle-class, white neighborhoods who make the same mistakes, she says, as people (mostly males) of color in the inner city are treated differently and don’t have to pay for those mistakes for the rest of their lives.