Mass Incarceration of Black Men in the United States

Mass Incarceration of Black Men in the United States

One of the most pejorative features of the criminal justice system of the United States is the racial disparities in the system. In the United States, black people are five times more likely to be imprisoned than whites. According to a report by Petit and Sykes (2017), “one in ten black children living in America has a parent in prison, compared with about one in sixty white children.” This predicament has continued for a long time, and it has even become an accepted norm in the United States. Another report shows that “black people in America are incarcerated in prisons at an average rate of 5.1 times that of white people in America and this rate was ten times more in other states” (Nellis 2). There are two main reasons for this disparity. The first reason holds that the mass incarceration of black people is so that black people can be managed as black people, which is a racist system that established after the success of the civil right movement and the end of the Jim Crow laws. The other reason is that this crisis exists as a capitalist scheme to manage poor black people, “a system that emerged from the rollback of the liberal social welfare state and other neoliberal reforms” (Johnson 60)..

However, it may come as a surprise that over the last 15 years, the issue of racial disparities in American prisons has declined. “Between 2000 and 2015, the imprisonment rate of black men decreased by more than 24%” (Puglise 1). Among women, this change is even more dramatic. Between 2000 and 2014, the imprisonment rates of black women decreased by almost 50%. The racial disparity between black women and white women’s incarceration has reduced. Despite this reduction in the rates of imprisonment of black people in American prisons, the crisis is still prevalent today, with higher rates of the incarceration of black people being higher than white people in America. Even though it has made considerable progress over the years, the United States remains a noticeably racially segregated nation. It also remains economically segregated. It does not come as a surprise that destitute non-white individuals have been incarcerated excessively during the monstrous increment in imprisonment that has happened in the country since the mid-1980s. It is from black communities that a huge number of criminals are evacuated, and to these neighborhoods that they come back when their sentences end. This populace stirring has been designated “coercive mobility” by criminal experts. Despite the fact that it is the purpose of governing bodies, police, judges, and prosecutors to ensure that residents and communities are safe, there is a drive to accept that coercive mobility has the inadvertent outcome of increasing crime and victimization.

An extensive debate among different criminologists has developed about race and justice in which the main question is the amount of high minority detainment is a result of differential overtone in criminal conduct against a one-sided criminal justice system. This debate has not been settled. However, one factor that is agreed upon in general is that there is a high representation of minority group members among the people engaging in criminal activities, yet even considering this, people of color continue to be overrepresented in American prisons and jails. The underlying question is how much of the increasing levels of incarceration of black people and Latinos are justified by higher incarceration levels and what proportion is unjustified. Research shows that the answers to these questions can be acquired by analyzing the types of crime. Evidence suggests that among the most serious violent crimes, unjustified racial disparity is modest. On the other hand, for the less serious crimes, the proportion of unjustified racial disparity heightens. This can clearly be observed in the evidence on drug incarcerations from the war on drugs. Proof from research shows that “racial groups use and sell drugs to their representation in the populace, and therefore, 13% of drug users and sellers are black people while 17% are Latinos” (Sheet 1). Approximately 65% are white people. Nevertheless, more than 50 percent of those in prisons for selling drugs or caught in possession are people of color. As the author of The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander documents, the war on drugs has been remunerated more aggressively against people of color. The black versus white disparity for drug arrests and imprisonment remains extreme.

However, the decrease of the gap between black and white people imprisonment from drugs from the mid-1990s to the time that the 1994 crime bill was passed, which many people argue was the main reason for the spike in black people’s incarceration, has almost been as sharp. In 2000, white people also started being arrested and imprisoned more often for dealing with drugs. Between 2000 and 2009, the incarceration rate of black people due to drug offenses dropped by 16% while that of white people increased by nearly 27%. Experts argue that the reason for this was the waning of the crack epidemic, which devastated black people in the 1980s and 1990s, and the rise of another epidemic of meth and opioids, which were used in greater numbers among white people. This theory may also explain the reason why the narrowing of the racial disparity had been more dramatic among women, who are inexplicably incarcerated for drug crimes (Mauer 5). On the same issue of drugs and black incarceration, some observers believe that black people dealing in drugs are more likely to be arrested and detained since they conduct the drug dealing activities in open public areas as opposed to whites who conduct their dealings in hidden places. However, research shows that police in America choose to pursue minority dealers and ignore the white dealers. In general, the war on drugs has been especially hard on the minority groups, especially black minorities, an issue that cannot be justified by an overrepresentation of these minorities in this form of criminal behavior.

When Michelle Alexander’s book (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness) was published in 2010, the conversation about race, racism, and incarceration in the United States changed. The book came and spiked a lot of arguments from the public, commentators, policymakers, and politicians and displayed the glaring wrongs that people had been living with and that they did not know how to face. Since the book was published, the burning issue on how to change the criminal justice system for the better and end the laws that continue to support racial disparities still remains. Still, more black people are controlled by the criminal justice system of America. In the United States, once someone has been branded a criminal, he or she is denied housing, social amenities, and the right to vote. More than 6 million US citizens have been denied the right to vote due to their connection with the criminal justice system. In the United States, one in every thirteen blacks of voting age is marginalized. For these black Americans, the gains of the Civil Rights Movement have been annulled. Michelle Alexander argues that together, all these issues affecting the black communities have created a situation whereby a misappropriate number of black people have been relegated to sort of a permanent second-class social status.

Today, mass incarceration mirrors the Jim Crow laws that separated America until the mid-1960s. Under these laws, black people were relegated to a lesser status for many years. Some policies, such as literacy tests for voters, were designed to prevent black people from serving on juries that were common in most of the Southern states. Many of the advances of the Civil Rights Movement that were propagated years ago have now been destabilized by the mass incarceration of black people in America, especially in the war on drugs. According to Michelle Alexander, millions of black people who are arrested for small crimes remain marginalized and trapped by an unjust criminal justice systems that for a long time has always seen them as felons and denied them the basic rights that would allow them to become more productive and law-abiding American citizens. Michelle further argues that the criminal justice system, together with the “war on drugs,” aimed at the poor people of color, is an extension of former strategies to deny the people of color their rights. In her book, she writes,

“In each generation, new tactics have been used for achieving the same goals—goals shared by the Founding Fathers. Denying African Americans citizenship was deemed essential to the formation of the original union. Hundreds of years later, America is still not an egalitarian democracy. The arguments and rationalizations that have been trotted out in support of racial exclusion and discrimination in its various forms have changed and evolved, but the outcome has remained largely the same. An extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history. They are also subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service, just as their parents, grandparents, and great–grandparents once were…” (Alexander 30).

What has changed since the Jim Crow laws collapsed has very little to do with the basic structure of modern society and more with the language used to justify inequality and prejudice, especially against minority groups. In a colorblindness era, it is not socially acceptable to use race, unambiguously, as justification for exclusion, discrimination, and social contempt. Rather, people now use the criminal justice system to associate crime with black people and then engage in intolerant practices that were supposedly left behind. Nowadays, it is not illegal to discriminate against ex-offenders the same way it was once legal to discriminate against black people. As seen, crime rates have very little to do with incarceration rates. During the past 30 years, crime rates have fluctuated while, on the other hand, incarceration rates have soared. Most criminologists conform that incarceration rates and crime rates have moved separately from each other, where the rates of incarceration have hit the roof irrespective of whether crime has increased or decreased in any specific community or in the entire nation.

Many people wonder why there are no more lawsuits filled if the system is as widespread with bias. Why can individuals not file class-action lawsuits challenging police and prosecutors’ bias? However, as Michelle explains in her book, “many people do not realize that the Supreme Court rules that in the absence of conscious, intentional bias — tantamount to an admission or a racial slur — you can’t present allegations of race discrimination in the criminal-justice system” (Alexander 13). As a result, such rulings have created an insuperable hurdle, as law-enforcers know better than to acknowledge racial bias and much of the prejudice that pervades the system is entrenched in unconscious racial stereotypes about certain groups of people that comes down to race.

Conclusion

Understanding the reality of mass incarceration and the main causes leading to the crisis is important, especially for policymakers who are interested in rolling back the American State. Even though racial discrimination and bias are among the main contributors to the unjust nature of the criminal justice system, it will not help much to simply eliminate the bias to reduce the racial disparities of mass incarceration on black communities in the United States. This is mainly due to most people’s radicalized class system. Therefore, to deal with this issue, there has been a great deal of activism and advocacy which have been focused on challenging the way police in the United States disproportionately target black people. Others focus on the issue of sentencing, particularly the long prison sentences meted out by the US justice system, especially for black people. The activist movements aim to address the long period of the sentencing of people of color, as currently, the sentences imposed on black men is almost 20% longer than that imposed on whites who have been convicted of the same crimes. Sentencing reform activists campaign to ask for more discretion from the judges in determining the appropriate and more reasonable sentences, especially for the black people in the United States. Finally, activists have been trying to restore the rights of incarcerated individuals. Some of these activist undertakings include challenging employment discrimination. This research clearly shows that the issue of mass incarceration of black people in America is a huge crisis that needs to be addressed. It is clear that the continued racial segregation aggravates the existing inequalities and fosters serious social and economic disadvantages. The only way to deal with this crisis is to enforce more robust federal and state laws aimed at reducing the disparity between the black minority and white majority crime rates. These, along with eradicating the overuse of prisons to confront social problems, will go a long way in reducing the effects of the collateral impacts from incarceration and coercive mobility on black people in the United States.

Works Cited

Alexander, Michelle. “The new jim crow.” Ohio St. J. Crim. L. 9 (2011): 7.

Alexander, Michelle, and Michelle Alexander. “The New Jim Crow”. The American Prospect, 2019, https://prospect.org/special-report/new-jim-crow/.

Hager, Eli, and Bill Keller. “Everything you think you know about mass incarceration is wrong.” The Marshall Project (2017).

Johnson, Cedric. “The Panthers can’t save us now.” Catalyst 1.1 (2017): 57-87.

Mauer, Marc. The changing racial dynamics of women’s incarceration. Washington, DC: Sentencing Project, 2013.

Nellis, Ashley. The color of justice: Racial and ethnic disparity in state prisons. Sentencing Project, 2016.

Pettit, B., and B. Sykes. “Incarceration: State of the union 2017.” Pathways: The stanford center on poverty and inequality poverty and inequality report, race and ethnicity (2017).

Puglise, Nicole. “Black Americans Incarcerated Five Times More Than White People – Report”. The Guardian, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/18/mass-incarceration-black-americans-higher-rates-disparities-report.

Sheet, Fact. “Trends in US corrections.” The Sentencing Project (2015).