SAVING OUR YOUTH VA
The New Jim Crow
VS
The New Black Identity
One-third of African American male high-school dropouts under age 40 are currently behind bars. Among all African American men born since the mid-1960s, more than 20 percent will go to prison, nearly twice the number that will graduate college. This extraordinary pattern of penal confinement has been called “mass incarceration,” a rate of incarceration so high that it affects not only the individual offender, but also whole social groups. The social group we’re talking about is Black Americans.
It’s true that once a person is labeled a felon, there’s employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity,
benefits, and exclusion from jury service. And the facts that Black Americans hold a lot of beds in prisons and jails those laws discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and pertain to them leaving them unemployed, without homes, etc.
So, The New Jim Crow, is basically stating that since it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt, the Criminal Justice System has found a way around that and put Blacks in jail giving them legal permission to discriminate against them the same way they did during the Jim Crow era hence keeping the Black family down.
We will argue that it’s no longer the fault of the Criminal Justice System that there are so many Blacks in jail. We will argue that mass incarceration is not the Criminal Justice System trying to keep the Black man down. We will argue that the war on drugs is not to blame for the massive amounts of Blacks in jail. We will argue that mass incarceration is not a form of racial control. We will argue that The New Jim Crow is just another reason to blame somebody else for the problems in many black families. We will argue that the problem is not The New Jim Crow, the problem is the New Black Identity.
