Michelle
Alexander has recently written that the current system of mass incarceration "looks and
feels a lot like an era we supposedly left behind." What she means is that the current
criminal justice system, both in effect and, she argues, by design, sets African American men
and women aside as a class, discriminating against them on a vast scale. In effect, African
Americans are criminalized by a society.
The numbers support this contention.
According to data collected by the NAACP, African Americans are incarcerated at five times the
rate of white men, in numbers vastly disproportionate to the percentage of the population.
Despite the fact that African Americans represent 12% of the overall adult population of the
United States, they make up over one-third of the people incarcerated. This is largely due to
systemic poverty and laws that have had the effect of criminalizing certain drugs, for example,
but it is also due to overt discrimination against people of color in the criminal justice
system.
The effects are dramatica sizable percentage of the African American
male population is statistically likely to wind up in prison. For each person involved, this
takes away many of their most productive years and makes finding a job more difficult, if not
impossible. Because many states do not allow former felons to vote, it disfranchises huge swaths
of the black community. It also sets black men in particular apart as a criminal
class.
Each of these has the effect of perpetuating discrimination in ways as
powerful as the African American community faced amid the depths of Jim Crow
segregation.
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