"Thousands of black men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed by whites."

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

#BlackMastodon #BlackFedi #TheNewJimCrow

"One study, for example, published in 2000 by the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that white students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, use crack cocaine at eight times the rate of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students."

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

#BlackMastodon #BlackFedi #TheNewJimCrow

"Under the usual-residence rule, the Census Bureau counts imprisoned individuals as residents of the jurisdiction in which they are incarcerated. Because most new prison construction occurs in predominately white, rural areas, white communities benefit from inflated population totals at the expense of the urban, overwhelmingly minority communities from which the prisoners come."

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

#BlackMastodon #TheNewJimCrow

"The typical mandatory sentence for a first-time drug offense in federal court is five or ten years. By contrast, in other developed countries around the world, a first-time drug offense would merit no more than six months in jail, if jail time is imposed at all."

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

#BlackMastodon #BlackFedi #TheNewJimCrow

#BlackMastodon #BlackFedi #TheNewJimCrow

that is disenfranchised, i.e. cannot vote, find a job, own a firearm, receive federal funds for housing, food or supplemental income, etc.

Her argument is persuasive and will likely change your thinking about the prison industrial complex.

https://newjimcrow.com/about-the-author

(2/2)

#BlackMastodon #BlackFedi #TheNewJimCrow

I tooted a series of quotes this morning, as well as a few weeks ago, from Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow. This book has as its premise that the current situation of loss of privileges in the Black community due to incarceration is reminiscent of the Jim Crow era.

The timing of the "law and order" agenda as well as the War on Drugs have resulted in an entire segment of the population

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"For more than a decade – from the mid 1950s until the late 1960s – conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime."

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

#BlackMastodon #BlackFedi #TheNewJimCrow

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. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order.

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

#BlackMastodon #TheNewJimCrow

"Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs."

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

#BlackMastodon #BlackFedi #TheNewJimCrow

"Once a person is labeled a felon, he or she is ushered into a parallel universe in which discrimination, stigma, and exclusion are perfectly legal, and privileges of citizenship such as voting and jury service are off-limits. "

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

#BlackMastodon #BlackFedi #TheNewJimCrow

"The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran."

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

#BlackMastodon #BlackFedi #TheNewJimCrow

"The mass incarceration of people of color is a big part of the reason that a black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery."

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

#BlackMastodon #BlackFedi #TheNewJimCrow

"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."

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

#BlackMastodon #BlackFedi #TheNewJimCrow

This would have been very helpful context for me back in 2020 when the George Floyd protests broke out in Minneapolis.

#BLM #TheNewJimCrow #MichelleAlexander