4-17 Homework #11 due: Read Jean Twenge’s “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” and write a 3-paragraph essay about the alleged delayed development Millennials face from smartphones and helicopter parents. Show CNN Special Report: Being 13.
4-22 Homework #12 due: Read Adam Gopnik’s “The Caging of America” and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains why mass incarceration is America’s greatest scandal. I recommend you see documentary 13th on Netflix. See various essays and videos about for-profit prisons by Shane Bauer.
4-24 Homework #13 due: Read Richard Florida’s “Immigrants Boost Wages for Everyone” and write a 3-paragraph essay that analyzes the validity of Florida’s claim. See Vice Video “Home Sweet Alabama.” Also see PBS myths about immigrants; see US News; see CNBC video.
See video “3 Arguments Why Marijuana Should Stay Illegal” and support, refute, or complicate the argument that legalizing weed is a bad idea. We will also address the anti-vaxxers so we can develop an argumentative thesis that analyzes the phenomenon of privileged parents embracing the anti-vaxxer lifestyle. Consult the following: John Oliver video on vaccinations. Also see "Why Vaccination Refusal Is a White Privilege Problem"
4-29 Homework #14 due: Read “America’s Invisible Pot Addicts” and in 3 paragraphs explain the dangers of legalized pot. See Netflix Explained episode about history of marijuana.
5-1 Peer Edit
5-6 Essay # 4 due
Essay #4 Due Date: 5-6-18
You need a minimum of 3 sources for your Works Cited page.
Option One: Read Tristan Harris’ “Our Minds Have Been Hijacked by Our Phones,” “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds,” and his Ted Talk video. Then develop a thesis that evaluates the validity of his claim that technology, especially smartphones, are not empowering us but “hijacking” our freedom and autonomy and working against our best interests. You may refer to Sherry Turkle’s Ted Talk “Connected, But Alone?”
Option Two: Read Jean Twenge’s “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” and write an essay that argues for or against Twenge’s claim that smartphones combined with helicopter parenting are resulting in delayed development of Millennials and Generation Z (born after mid 90s). You may refer to CNN Special Report: Being Thirteen.
Option Three. Develop an argumentative thesis that compares the spiritual evisceration and mental dissolution in Andrew Sullivan’s essay “I Used to be a Human Being” with Netflix Black Mirror episode “Nosedive.” You may consult Sherry Turkle’s YouTube Ted Talk “Connected But Alone.”
Option Four: Read Adam Gopnik’s “The Caging of America” and write a thesis that supports, refutes, or complicates the claim that mass incarceration is “The New Jim Crow.” Refer to the Netflix documentary 13th.
Option Five: Read Richard Florida’s “Immigrants Boost Wages for Everyone” and write an argumentative essay that analyzes the validity of Florida’s claim. See Vice Video “Home Sweet Alabama.”
Option Six: Develop an argumentative thesis that analyzes the phenomenon of privileged parents embracing the anti-vaxxer lifestyle. Consult the following: John Oliver video on vaccinations. Also see "Why Vaccination Refusal Is a White Privilege Problem."
Option Seven: See video “3 Arguments Why Marijuana Should Stay Illegal” and read Annie Lowry’s essay “America’s Invisible Pot Addicts” and support, refute, or complicate the argument that legalizing weed is a bad idea. See Netflix documentary and Netflix Explained.
Option Eight:
Watch Hasan Minhaj video (on both Netflix under Patriot Act and YouTube) and support, refute, or complicate the assertion that the presidential administration is undermining civil rights to the detriment of American democracy and freedom. Be sure to have a counterargument section. For example, defenders of the administration would argue that their policies strengthen America against terrorism.
Default Setting Essay Template for 1,200-word essay
9 Paragraphs, 135 words per paragraph, approx. 1,200 words (1,215 to be exact)
Paragraph 1: Attention-getting introduction
Paragraph 2: Transition from introduction to argumentative claim (thesis)
Paragraphs 3-6: Body paragraphs that give reasons for supporting your claim.
Paragraphs 7 & 8: Counterarguments in which you anticipate how your opponents will disagree with you, and you then provide rebuttals to those counterarguments.
Paragraph 9: Conclusion, an emotionally powerful re-statement of your thesis.
Make sure to include a Works Cited page.
Option Two: Read Jean Twenge’s “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” and write an essay that argues for or against Twenge’s claim that smartphones combined with helicopter parenting are resulting in delayed development of Millennials and Generation Z (born after mid 90s). You may refer to CNN Special Report: Being Thirteen.
Counterarguments
One. We do not exist in a monolithic economic class. Why doesn't Twenge address poverty and depression? Is her causal analysis an over simplification? I'd say yes it its.
Two. Why one generation? Everyone is depressed and anxious from smartphones and related social media platforms, according to all studies. Why pick on one group of people?
Three. Screen time is correlated with poverty: The more poor we are, the more we're on our screens, the more we're debased and depressed by a compromised existence, as Nellie Bowles writes about digital use in her essay.
Four. Young people are overworked and face a declining American dream. They also suffer from burnout. Why aren't these factors addressed in teen depression? Anne Helen Petersen, writing for Buzzfeed, writes about this burnout.
Five. The problem isn't that Twenge doesn't address reality. The problem is that Twenge just addresses a sliver of reality and she lacks a comprehensive grasp of the problem of teen depression and arrested development.
Six. I have a lot of young students who are not addicted to their smartphones, but they suffer huge financial pressure, they suffer from food and home insecurity, they suffer from huge sleep deficits, and they suffer from lack of private space to do their homework. In totality, these challenges contribute to depression and anxiety in ways that are not discussed in Twenge's essay.
Summary of Critique:
Twenge’s statistics need to address economic class:
“Take a more granular look at the full range of usage, and it looks like the biggest risk of unhappiness is among those poor twelfth graders who don’t use social media at all. Quick! Someone get those kids a smartphone!”
We should consider that as parents work more to struggle to pay for higher cost of living with stagnant wages, they are tuning out their children more.
Now that parents have smartphones, they are tempted to disappear on their phones and withdraw from their children.
We read:
Zussman summarizes his findings with words that could just as easily apply to today’s smartphone-wielding parents:
Parents are, indeed, influenced by competing activity. They resort to a level of behavior that might be called “minimal parenting.” At this level of parenting, positive behaviors are regarded as expendable and are curtailed when parental load limits are reached. Although parents remain available to the children, they are slower to respond and interact with them for shorter periods, and their attention shifts rapidly among the two children and the task. They must continue to exert some control over the children, however, and negative behaviors may be increased in minimal parenting because they are seen as methods of obtaining rapid compliance.
Continuing in Psychology Today:
1) the data the author chooses to present are cherry-picked, by which I mean she reviews only those studies that support her idea and ignores studies that suggest that screen use is NOT associated with outcomes like depression and loneliness or that suggest that active social media use is actually associated with positive outcomes like resilience.
2) the studies she reviews are all correlational, meaning that the researchers merely observed associations between certain variables (e.g., smartphone use and depression). These studies leave open the possibilities that such associations are due to smartphones causing depression, depression symptoms causing greater use of smartphones, or a third variable, such as number extracurricular activities, causing both to rise and fall together. To actually know whether smartphone use causes depression, we'd have to assign large groups of adolescents perfectly matched on all number of variables to a long period where one group uses smartphones extensively and the other does not, and then watch to see whether depression levels rises more in one group versus the other. But even then we'd have to be careful to have the non-smartphone users have something else to do with their time that was carefully matched to smartphone use on time and engagement and social connectedness. Twenge is careful to note at several points this weakness of the research, explicitly calling out the correlational nature of the data. However, other places she says things like, "Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent."
3) the studies she reviews largely ignore social contexts and how people differ, instead reporting only average effects and correlations. Emerging evidence indicates that like every other question psychologists can think to ask about human behavior, screen use and its association with psychological well-being varies based on a multitude of contextual and personal variables - for instance, how you use media, when you use it, and what else is going on in your life. For instance, this article by Andrew K. Przybylski and Netta Weinstein uses a careful design that takes into account these sorts of factors and concludes that "moderate use of digital technology is not intrinsically harmful and may be advantageous in a connected world."
Nowhere is Twenge's bias more obvious to me than in some research that she actually does review but then casts aside as seemingly irrelevant to her thesis - namely, the vast counter-evidence to the "destroyed generation" thesis contained in her headline. In the introduction to the piece she notes that this generation has sharply lower rates of alcohol use, teen pregnancies, unprotected sex, smoking, and car accidents than previous generations. This is what a destroyed generation looks like?
Moreover, there is good reason to think that smartphones and social media may have positive effects as well as negative effects. Routinely feeling connected to your social peers could have beneficial effects. Clive Thompson has written an entire book reviewing the evidence that technology may be amplifying our intelligence, our productivity, and our "ambient awareness" of each other's worlds. Kristelle Lavallee, Content Strategist at the Center on Media and Child Health out of Boston Children's Hospital, told me in an interview about many of the beneficial effects of social media on adolescent development. For instance, teens can find other teens interested in the same social movements, connect with teens across the globe on interests like music and fashion, and feel embedded in a social network filled with meaning.
Analysis or Rebuttal of Counterargument
The Psychology Today author says if we let kids use phones in moderation, they’ll be okay, but my counterargument is this: smartphones are created to NOT BE MODERATE. ADDICTION IS THEIR SOLE PURPOSE.
Refer to Irresistible lesson on addiction.
CNN video about Secret World of Teens
5 Critics
Sarah Rose Cavanagh observes that Twenge "cherry picks" her evidence.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown argues that Twenge is engaging in "fear mongering."
Malcolm Harris critiques Jean Twenge's "sloppy research." Here is Harris' excerpt:
Twenge is not very interested in possible financial reasons for general change. In her scholarly work, she has suggested that market cycles fluctuate rather than follow a consistent trend, and that makes economics a poor explanatory variable. In iGen, she writes off the importance of the 2007–09 recession because “[u]nemployment, one of the best indicators of how the economy is affecting real people, peaked in 2010 and then declined.” Aside from the unemployment rate being a notoriously unreliable indicator of how the economy is affecting real people, that is a profoundly incurious sentence. There have been major changes to the nature of work and employment over the past few decades, and for Twenge to more or less ignore all of it because unemployment is back under 5 percent seems like more than an error. It hints at something deeper about why the book exists.
The 313-page book is broken into (by my count) 99 bite-size sections, and features 123 half-page charts, the “vast majority” (author’s words) of which come from four national surveys on youth attitudes and behaviors. That structure makes for a breezy read, but there’s only so much substance anyone can fit in so few pages. Evidence and ideas are presented without interrogation or critique. Twenge conducted 23 interviews (of up to two hours) with young people, and their quotes — along with some internet-sourced anecdotes — provide minor qualitative support. Mixed together and squirted into three-page section molds, it all feels pat and formulaic, more like a detailed corporate research dossier than an earnest work of inquiry.
Sometimes, though, the research is just sloppy. “The Internet — and society in general — promotes a relentless positivity these days,” Twenge writes in one section. “Social media posts highlight the happy moments but rarely the sad ones.” Only five pages later, Twenge introduces the reader to a teen named Laura and her Tumblr page, “a depressed person life [sic].” “Her pain is starkly evident in her posts,” Twenge writes, “which include ‘That’s how depression hits. You wake up one morning afraid that you’re going to live.’” Twenge likes the post so much, she uses it as a section title, and it is a good line — which is probably why Laura reblogged it from Elizabeth Wurtzel’s iconic Gen-X memoir Prozac Nation.
If the deleterious impact of smartphones is the premise of iGen, then Twenge has two main conclusions: “Overall, iGen is good news for managers” and “iGen’ers are scared, maybe even terrified.” Instead of investigating the possible links between these two findings, Twenge offers the managers suggestions for luring iGeners, like referring to the office’s “safe environment.” But at the end of the day, corporations have no interest in making their workers feel safer when fear makes them “less likely to expect more pay for less work.” (Twenge could have phrased it in the opposite direction, as “more likely to expect less pay for more work,” which would have clarified the stakes for employers.) This connection between an increase in the rate of exploitation and an increase in fear within the cohort would be by far the strongest argument in iGen, if Twenge had bothered to make it. Why didn’t she?
The term “millennial” was invented by William Strauss and Neil Howe, who’d been stars of the generational-consultant industry since their 1991 book Generations. Coining “millennials” made Strauss and Howe name brands — even though critics found their book Millennials Rising decidedly lightweight — and in a 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education article, Eric Hoover put Howe’s speaking rate between $5,000 and $14,000 a pop plus expenses, with too many offers to take them all. The two authors also formed a consultancy called LifeCourse Associates, which lists clients “from Disney to the U.S. Marine Corps.” Compared to all that, book money is chump change.
Twenge is featured in the 2009 Chronicle article, too, as a second-tier speaker ($1,000 to $5,000), but with a more skeptical and data-based view than the optimistic Strauss and Howe. With iGen — her own coinage — Twenge looks to be the next marquee name as the millennial boys fade from prominence. That helps explain why there’s more in the book about how textbook manufacturers can engage students (“interactive activities” and “lower their reading level”) than why most iGeners oppose the capitalist system that has gone largely uncontested by Americans for 50 years. It helps explain why she poses questions like “How can managers get the most out of the newest generation in the workforce?” or says things like “Car manufacturers should take heart” and “this is good news for advertisers and marketers.”
When David Brooks (of all people) reviewed Millennials Rising, he wrote that, “This is not a good book, if by good you mean the kind of book in which the authors have rigorously sifted the evidence and carefully supported their assertions with data. But it is a very good bad book. It’s stuffed with interesting nuggets.” Twenge seems to have followed that description like a map; iGen is a nugget cluster with the rigor of a sales brochure. I have little doubt it will take her all the way to the bank.
Alexandra Samuel writes that Jean Twenge "is on to something" but misses the correct emphasis: parents.
Lisa Guernsey argues that Twenge is overstating her case about a "ruined generation" and that a more nuanced analysis of teen depression is in order.
Sample Thesis Statements
Thesis with Concession
While Twenge makes some convincing points about smartphones hurting young people, her diagnosis fails to persuade when we consider that her analysis of teen depression and teen arrested development is so specific that it leaves us with an oversimplification, it gives us faulty causation, and it obfuscates more compelling causes of teen depression such as financial and family deficits, and even parents who are smartphone addicts.
For your counterargument, you might address her claim that low unemployment proves that poverty is not the cause of teen depression.
Thesis with No Concession
Twenge sounding the alarm bells about smartphones causing a "ruined generation" is third-rate self-promotional propaganda larded with logical fallacies, hyperbole, and sloppy research. To be more specific, her alarm bells about smartphones ruining a generation fail to persuade when we consider her self-contradictions, her "cherry-picked studies," her faulty causation, her dismissal of smartphones' positive effects, her dismissal of economic strain, her failure to consider minimal parenting, and her failure to define in any convincing way her notion of a "ruined generation."
Thesis That Defends Twenge with a Concession
While Twenge's research methods are somewhat faulty, she does a persuasive job of showing how the smartphone is curtailing a generation's growth and contributing to depression by connecting pathological, addictive behaviors that are replacing a healthy normal growing-up process.
Thesis That Defends Twenge by Objecting to McMahon's Lecture
In an exhibition of quintessential virtue signalling, McMahon is eager to discuss the young generation's malaise in terms of economic hardship, lack of personal space, and lack of sleep; however, these factors, however true they may be, do not contradict Twenge's claim that smartphones are afflicting young people with very specific types of pathologies and addictive behaviors that are connected to smartphones and smartphones alone.
Thesis That Defends McMahon While Refuting Twenge
To discuss the connection of smartphones and young people's pathologies is irresponsible without giving these pathologies context in terms of economic hardship, lack of private space, and lack of sleep because, as McMahon correctly observes, smartphone addiction does not exist in a vacuum; rather this insidious addiction is debilitating precisely because of the social factors that McMahon rightly says should be included in Twenge's overreaching, oversimplified analysis.
Adam Gopnik from “The Caging of America”
- We give longer sentences for the same crime than all other countries in the world.
- Over 400 teenagers in Texas have life sentences.
- 6 million Americans are under “correctional supervision.” There are 2.4 Americans in prison.
- In 1980, there were 220 Americans in prison for every 100,000 people. In 2010 that number has jumped to 731. No developed country in the world comes close to this.
- Here’s some evidence or data for our immoral prison system being part of The New Jim Crow: In two decades prison spending is up 600%. Here’s the warrant, the logic that connects the data to the claim that the modern prison system is part of The New Jim Crow: The money incentive, not smart and moral public policy, is the driving force.
- Gopnik: The US prison system is the “moral scandal of American life.” It’s a scandal most Americans are indifferent to because they’re sedated by the blue pill in The Matrix. Reading Gopnik’s essay and Alexander’s book is the equivalent of taking the red pill.
- Today’s prison policy is influenced by 19th Century America when prison was seen as a slave plantation.
- There is a landmark book that analyzes the corruption of our prison system. It’s Collapse of American Criminal Justice by William J. Stuntz. It reinforces many of the points made in The New Jim Crow.
- We see an evil marriage of public policy and private interests: Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison company, enjoys financial growth that is dependent on America’s growing arrest rate (which is 90% people of color). The company’s stockholders want more arrests (not caring about the racial disparities and draconian nature of those arrests for all people) because they want to see their stock grow and grow. To make sure their stockholders are happy, CCA “spends millions lobbying legislators” to serve the purpose of the stockholders. Human rights can be damned as far as they’re concerned. They want their money.
- The above example evidences that America is less of a democracy and more of an oligarchy. The word oligarchy is Greek which means the state is ruled by a only a few. In fact the Greek root oligos means “few.” We can conclude—and this would be in my conclusion of my paper when I restated my thesis—that to perpetuate The New Jim Crow is not only about the perpetuation of racism, slavery, and Jim Crow; it’s about a country being degraded into a corrupt oligarchy. I emphasize this because a conclusion should show the wider ramifications of your claim’s message.
Jim Crow 1.0
The attributes of Jim Crow 1.0:
Backlash and hostility against blacks in the face of the Reconstruction Era, a period of poor white resentment
Stereotypes of black males and predators and lazy ne’er-do-wells.
Strict unemployment laws against blacks and job discrimination, a disastrous combination.
No interracial relationships, seating, eating, hotels, rooms, etc. In other words, complete segregation. These laws kept a rift between poor whites and blacks and prevented them from forming an alliance.
KKK interference with black voting.
KKK lynchings of black men with no arrests.
An overall “terrorist campaign” against blacks (31)
Tens of thousands of blacks were “arbitrarily arrested” for “mischief” and “insulting gestures” (31).
Let's be clear: Mischief and insulting gestures are terms open to wide interpretation.
Black prison convicts had no human rights; they were as good as dead (31)
A new form of slavery emerged: black labor from prison (32)
Civil Rights foreshadowed the Birth of Mass Incarceration, AKA Jim Crow 2.0:
The Civil Rights Movement merged with the Poor People’s Movement and this alliance between poor whites and blacks threatened to challenge the distribution of wealth. A new racial control, splitting whites and blacks again (see 47-49), had to be established. See pages 39 and 40. Whites had to see blacks as “criminals” and pay taxes to erect a multi-billion-dollar prison system that employs over 2.5 million people.
President Reagan and other conservatives demonized the Civil Rights Movement:
We see on page 48 that the helping of the poor became “enabling welfare queens and criminal predators,” and in essence was ballooning this huge criminal underclass, which had to be controlled with The War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration.
In this Jim Crow 2.0 there was no explicit racist language. Instead a new language was created based on words like criminality, welfare bums, food stamp abusers and these terms became codes for poor black people, the “undeserving others” (49).
The Effects of the War on Drugs and Criminals:
On page 49 we read that “overnight the budgets of federal law enforcement agencies soared. Between 1980 and 1984, FBI anti-drug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million.”
Department of Defense antidrug allocations increased from $33 million in 1981 to $1,042 million in 1991.
Antidrug spending grew from $38 to $181 million.
Agencies for drug treatment, prevention, and education were dramatically reduced.
The budget for National Institute on Drug Abuse was reduced from $274 to $57 million from 1981 to 1984.
Department of Education suffered cuts from $14 million to $3 million.
All of these cuts and the demonization of the black inner cities as crack dens happened during huge economic collapse, a time when poor blacks were most vulnerable. We read, for example, that in the big cities black employment for blue-collar jobs went from 70% of all blacks working, in the late 1970s, to 28% by 1987.
During this time manufacturing jobs moved to the white suburbs and only 28% of black fathers had access to an automobile so they could drive from the cities to the suburbs.
These job losses were accompanied by increased incentives to sell drugs. “Crack hit the streets in 1985” (51).
Crack did indeed eviscerate the black community. But the government response was wrong. The correct response can be seen in Portugal. During a period of high drug use, Portugal decriminalized drugs and invested in treatment, prevention, and education and in ten years addiction and drug-related crime plummeted (51). But conservatives decided to wage a war against the “enemy.” And the media got into the act with images of “crack whores,” “crack babies,” and “gangbangers.” See page 52.
The Portugal study speaks to America's motives. Do we choose a solution, prison, that makes more criminals or do we choose a solution, decriminalization, which reduces drug use? Why would we choose the wrong path? If a parent learns that education disciplines a child more than spanking, why would the parent stick to spanking?
In 1988, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act with a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for possession of cocaine base with no evidence of intent to sell. And this law applied to first-time offenders.
The American people, 64%, supported this new drug war and they imprisoned huge numbers of black men but could feel colorblind and non-racist, because in their minds this was not about race; it was about criminality and drug use. But white drug users weren’t going to prison in the same numbers. A new racial caste system through mass incarceration was born (55).
Democrats didn’t want to appear soft on crime, so Clinton more than any other president did more to create the racial undercaste with a variety of bills (57).
Under Clinton, felons could not get public housing and other benefits. They lost all rights as human beings and lived under the shadow of oppression, just like in the days of Jim Crow (57).
By 1996, the penal budget doubled while food stamps and other benefits were slashed.
Ninety percent of those admitted in prison for drugs were black or Latino and yet the War on Drugs used race-neutral language. Jim Crow 2.0 was born.
Single leading cause of rising incarceration:
Drug offenses, which account for two thirds of the rise and more than half of the rise in state prisoners between 1985 and 2000 (60). There are more people in prisons and jails today for just drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980.
We read on page 60 that most prisoners are first offenders arrested for possession, not selling. In 2005, four out of five were arrested for possession only, not selling.
Another glaring fact: In the 1990s, marijuana was the leading cause for arrest. Marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol. By 2007 one in every 31 adults were behind bars, on probation, or on parole.
"Reasonable Cause" and War on Drugs:
First, the Fourth Amendment, the law against search and seizures, has been eradicated since a cop can say he had “reasonable cause” to do a drug search. This results in police harassment and intimidation in poor communities as the police can do warrantless searches (63).
Second, law enforcement can now use invasive means to do drug surveillance and forced drug tests and use of informants and allow the forfeiture of cash, property, and other belongings (62). So we see a huge economic motive to make these arrests.
Third, consent searches are now police policy and studies show that most people, intimidated by the police, will consent (66). As a result, human rights are being violated under the huge umbrella of "reasonable cause."
Fourth, the police can now rely on a pretext traffic stop (failing to make a turn signal or going 1 MPH over speed limit, to cite 2 examples) and use that stop as an excuse to do a drug search (67). Many people are forced to spread eagle on the ground during these searches. Ninety-nine percent of these people being investigated are innocent but left humiliated. The majority of these people are of color.
The author asks why would the police choose to arrest such an astonishing percentage of the American public for minor drug crimes (between 1980 and 2005 drug arrests more than tripled)?
Especially since drug use was in decline when the War on Drugs began in the early 1980s.
Here we get to the crux of the matter: The system’s design was control with tangible and intangible benefits. And these benefits were a “massive bribe” offered to state and local law enforcement. Millions of dollars are given to local law enforcement. The military gives weapons, including bazookas, helicopters, night-vision goggles (74).
SWAT raid inappropriate for the War on Drugs:
Trauma, disproportion, and financial incentives. Each drug arrest brought $153 in funding, so the more arrests, the more money. See page 78.
Other dramatic changes took place under the Reagan Administration during the War on Drugs:
On page 78, we see that the police now had the right to seize and keep everything for themselves, including cash and other assets. State and local police could keep up to 80 percent of assets’ value. This in turn increased police budgets. So not only was the prison industry expanding into a multi-billion-dollar business, police departments were getting richer with the incentive to make more arrests. Between 1988 and 1992 alone, this forfeiture law amassed over a billion dollars in assets.
And the targets of these arrests were poor because they lack the means to hire an attorney and defend themselves. And since the poor represent easy cash, the police are encouraged to engage in illegal shakedowns, searches, and threats in search of forfeitable cash (80).
The big drug kingpins, the ones presumably targeted by the Drug War, go free because they can afford attorneys. It’s the little man who gets put in jail, so the War on Drugs fails on that level as well (79). For example, an investigation showed that when a person arrested can pay 50,000 dollars from drug profits seized would earn 6.3 year sentence reduction and agreements of $10,000 reduced trafficking charges by three-fourths (80).
After a poor person is arrested his chances of being free from the legal system are forever thin:
On page 84 we see that thousands of defendants are escorted through the courts with no legal counsel at all. Eighty percent of the defendants cannot hire a lawyer. In Lake Charles, Louisiana, we read that the defender office had only two investigators for the 2,500 new felony cases and 4,000 misdemeanor cases each year (85). We further read that defendants often plead guilty, even when innocent, without understanding their legal rights or what is occurring (86).
In most cases there is not trial because there is a plea bargain which results in a reduced sentence but carries with it a lifetime of stripped human rights: he can’t get government benefits or get a job. He’ll be under constant surveillance. The condition is called by Loic Wacquant a “closed circuit of perpetual marginality” (95).
We currently have 2.3 million in the prisons and another 5.1 million on probation or parole (94).
According to Human Rights Watch, 80-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison are African American (98).
Violent crimes are at historically low levels yet mass incarceration is on the rise (101).
Of the 7.3 million under correctional control, only 1.6 million are in prison (101).
The prison system encourages criminality so that 68% of those released from prisons are back in 3 years (94). And only a small minority for violent crimes.
The poor were targeted by the media at the onset of the Drug War as pathological and created an “us vs. them” mentality (105).
“Drug criminals” became a code word for black and this makes sense when we consider that about 90% of those arrested are poor black males (105).
Jim Crow 2.0 Is War on Drugs
Excerpt from Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow:
What is the single leading cause of rising incarceration?
Drug offenses, which account for two thirds of the rise and more than half of the rise in state prisoners between 1985 and 2000 (60). There are more people in prisons and jails today for just drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980.
We read on page 60 that most prisoners are first offenders arrested for possession, not selling. In 2005, four out of five were arrested for possession only, not selling.
Another glaring fact: In the 1990s, marijuana was the leading cause for arrest. Marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol. By 2007 one in every 31 adults were behind bars, on probation, or on parole.
What rules, if any, dictate the War on Drugs?
First, the Fourth Amendment, the law against search and seizures, has been eradicated since a cop can say he had “reasonable cause” to do a drug search. This results in police harassment and intimidation in poor communities as the police can do warrantless searches (63).
Second, law enforcement can now use invasive means to do drug surveillance and forced drug tests and use of informants and allow the forfeiture of cash, property, and other belongings (62). So we see a huge economic motive to make these arrests.
Third, consent searches are now police policy and studies show that most people, intimidated by the police, will consent (66). As a result, human rights are being violated under the huge umbrella of "reasonable cause."
Fourth, the police can now rely on a pretext traffic stop (failing to make a turn signal or going 1 MPH over speed limit, to cite 2 examples) and use that stop as an excuse to do a drug search (67). Many people are forced to spread eagle on the ground during these searches. Ninety-nine percent of these people being investigated are innocent but left humiliated. The majority of these people are of color.
How does white drug use differ from black drug use?
We read on page 99, that white students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students. Equal percentages use marijuana.
White drug dealers do their dealing, not on street corners like the poor, but in more discreet settings (100).
Crack cocaine, the major drug in black offenses, creates sentences that bring punishment with one hundred times more severity than offenses involving powder cocaine (the white drug) as we see on page 112. Crack law is unfair since plain cocaine results in far fewer sentences, a ratio of 100:1. Fair sentencing act may change this.
In Jim Crow 2.0, racial language is not used; there is a code that includes the type of drugs that will result in strong convictions. These strong convictions will be exacted on poor people of color, not white people with economic resources.
Why would there be huge resistance to reforming the New Jim Crow and Mass Incarceration?
We read on page 230 that if we got back to the incarceration rates of the 1970s, before the War on Drugs, we’d have release 4 out of 5 prisoners. This would reduce prison jobs and would be met with all-out war from the 700,000 prison guards, administrators, service workers and other prison personnel.
In a report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Statistics in 2006, the U.S. spent $185 billion for police protection, detention, judicial, and legal activities in 2003. This is a tripling of expenses since 1982.
The justice system employed almost 2.4 million people in 2003. If 4 out of 5 prisoners were released, far more than a million prison employees would lose their jobs.
Private sector also has an investment in prison growth and the mass incarceration of helpless and vulnerable people of color. For example, former vice president Dick Cheney has invested millions in private prisons. His bank account depends on the incarceration of more and more black men (230).
On page 231, the author gives a sample of “prison profiteers” who look for new ways to increase the prison business, with the targets always being the same: poor black men, the people this country has abandoned.
Consider this: On page 237 we read that 75% of all incarceration has no impact on crime, that if between 7 and 8 prisoners out of 10 were released, there’d be no change in crime; however, this 75% generates $200 billion annually. It’s a money-making device.
The moral bankruptcy of the New Jim Crow is that this multi-billion-dollar economy has been built on the backs of poor black men whom America doesn’t give a damn about. There’s an “it ain’t me” mentality that is morally loathsome and detestable.
Lexicon
One. Racial Caste System:
We had a caste system, based on the creation of race, during the time of slavery and during Jim Crow, but now we have Jim Crow 2.0 and a new racial caste system: a disproportionate number of black men in prison (7 black men for every white man) based on so-called "due process," which targets the poor and people of color. The United States is 5% of the world's population, yet we imprison 25% of all the world's prisoners.
As a country, we have an immoral appetite for putting people, especially poor people of color, in prison.
Two. Jim Crow:
During Reconstruction after the Civil War poor white farmers were angry that their lives were no better than the recently freed black people. White politicians, who needed those poor white votes, exploited the poor farmers' grievances by implementing Jim Crow, a system that separated black Americans into horrible conditions, racism, sub-wage work, failed schools, nonexistent government support, etc.
White politicians catered to the white supremacy religion of the poor white people who, having little, only could cling to their pathetic "religion" of white supremacy.
Three. Black Exceptionalism and the denial of racism in America:
Black Exceptionalism is the idea that since Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, Oprah, and others have "made it,"; therefore, there can't possibly be racism and that any failure on a black person's part results from an individual failure of will and character.
We read in The Autobiography of Malcolm X that since the beginning of America, white people love to parade black people "who made it" to assuage white guilt for slavery, racism, and Jim Crow.
Four. False Equivalency Argument When Discussing Racism and Slavery:
Now some people will say, "But other people, including people of color, have enslaved others? What do you say to that?"
My response:
Slavery is unique to America because an entire country of white people drank the White Supremacy Kool-Aid to justify an evil that was exacted for over 100 years, perpetuating in ugly forms of Jim Crow to this day.
So when we talk about slavery, we must consider
scale
duration
brainwashing
pervasiveness (an entire country brainwashed or an outlier group of rogue criminal?)
Five. Colorblind Code Language as the New Racist Language: using code words to demonize a race: "thugs, felons, stamp abusers, welfare queens . . ."
Race-Based Social Control (21), various institutions control African Americans; first slavery, then Jim Crow, then the US Prison System, AKA Jim Crow 2.0. Institutions die but "are reborn in new form."
Trifold Narrative of the book: Slavery (born of a religious mass psychosis called White Supremacy), Jim Crow, Jim Crow 2.0
Summary of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow
In the New Jim Crow, or Jim Crow 2.0, we replace offensive racial epithets, now banned, with the term “criminals.”
These "criminals" are mostly poor people of color and they are the new undercaste and they are denied human rights. They can’t vote, get housing, jobs, etc.
The author thought ten years ago it was stupid to compare today’s war on drugs to Jim Crow (post civil war oppression of African Americans), that such a comparison would make people think you’re crazy, but the evidence has shown that indeed such a comparison is compelling.
"Only crackpots would compare the plight of black America today with Jim Crow, or worse, with slavery." The author had these thoughts but her research showed her otherwise. There is a system designed to incarcerate black and brown Americans and this system makes money, a huge prison system. And it gains political points for politicians. Both the prison industry and the politicians, MA will show, make their careers off the blood and backs of brown and black people.
Here are some key features of the New Jim Crow, AKA, The War on Drugs:
The War on Drugs started in 1982 and picked up momentum in 1985 when the black community was demonized as a Crack Den. These demonized images saturated TV news and gave a very thin slice of African Americans, not the whole picture.
The Drug War started when crime and drug use was on decline and the author suggests that it started as a form of social control.
In thirty years, the number of US prisoners increased from 300,000 to over 2 million.This number has gone unquestioned
The US has the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized country. Such a fact speaks volumes about our freedom and our democracy and our morality.
In Germany, 93 out of 100,000 adults are incarcerated; in the US, the number is 8 times that amount or 750 out of 100,000.
Between 1960 and 1990 crime rates in Finland, Germany, and US were the same but during that time the US incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate decreased 60 percent, and the German rate remained unchanged. The author seems to suggest we have unsavory motives for our high incarceration rate.
Indeed, a New Yorker essay "The Caging of America" traces the moral bankruptcy that informs the US prison system.
The majority of US prisoners are black and brown men. Black men outnumber white men 7 to 1 yet are only 13 percent of the population. We call this disparity the "racial caste system."
Black and brown men are, in spite of similar rates of drug activity to whites, imprisoned 20-50 times greater than whites.
In Washington D.C. 3 out of 4 black men will be in prison.
In major cities throughout the US, 80% of black men have criminal records.
But illegal drug activity is not greater among blacks. Illegal drug activity happens in similar numbers among the different races.
The growth of US prisons is the largest form of race-based social control in world history.
Experts agree that prisons make more crime; they don’t reduce crime, yet there is an incentive to grow the prison industry: It makes billions of dollars (and employs about 2.5 million people) and as long as this money is made on the backs of black and brown men, the media and the public remain indifferent.
Racial caste system is hard to fight.
Because it is largely invisible and insidious with code words but evidence for its existence is overwhelming as we can see from the statistics above.
And because we throw people in prison under "due process," from the Bill of Rights, which we worship like some kind of God. We get so caught up with "due process," that we become blind to the results of this "due process."
Continuum of the racial caste system
Slavery, Jim Crow, and Jim Crow 2.0, AKA The War on Drugs, is “a stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom.” The new laws and customs put black and brown men into mass incarceration at disproportionate rates when their drug activity is not higher than other people’s.
This incarceration makes black and brown men members of the undercaste or second-class citizens based on prison label or criminal label, not prison time. Once labeled, they are denied citizen rights to vote, to serve jury duty, to work, etc.
On page 21, we see that when one type of racial oppression dies, a new one takes its place, what Reva Siegel has called “preservation through transformation.”
We no longer use racist language; we call people of color criminals or felons. Prison is the new form of control.
In American history, we see control over people of color has been largely to appease lower-class whites, who feel trapped at the bottom of society. The privileged whites throw the poor whites a dog bone: “Even though you’re poor, we’ll make people of color even more poor and even less privileged than you.”
We read further that Jim Crow was a reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation, the abolishment of slavery and it is the author’s contention that Mass Incarceration is the reaction to the Civil Rights Movement. See page 22.
Some claim to bathe in the glory of colorblindness and black exceptionalism (the idea that great blacks such Obama, Oprah, Bill Cosby, etc., and say these black celebrities are proof that blacks can climb the American ladder. However, according to Alexander, these arguments actually provide the essential tools for Jim Crow 2.0.
On page 14 we read, and this point will be developed later in the book, that they make us feel good for not having bigotry and hostility toward people of color while we have something far worse: indifference. Indifference to what? To quote the author, “A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch” (15).
The privileged whites had to appease poor whites. See the case of Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion on page 24. By appeasing Bacon, rich whites broke up the alliance between poor whites and blacks.
Tragedy of racism and slavery
During America’s Colonial period, there was no such thing as race. People of light and dark skin color worked side by side oblivious of race. The idea of race didn’t become prominent until European imperialism and American slavery a few hundred years ago. To kill and exploit people with justification, the term “savages” was created to replace human beings.
During slavery, white supremacy became a religion that “served to alleviate the white conscience and reconcile the tension between slavery and the democratic ideals espoused by whites . . .” (26). This religion endured beyond slavery.
American government is founded on property ownership and privilege over equal rights.
We see on page 25 that James Madison said the nation ought to be constituted “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”
We read further that the Constitution “was designed so the federal government would be weak” in relation to private property and the “states to conduct their own affairs.”
Economic incentives created Jim Crow in the aftermath of slavery’s abolishment.
Southern regions depended on the labor of former slaves or those economies “would surely collapse.”
Mass Incarceration Statistics
We imprison so many more people compared to other countries. However, our victimization rate is not larger than other countries. The Economist says we're imprisoning small-time dealers.
"The Caging of America" by Adam Gopnik
Refuting New Jim Crow Narrative
New Jim Crow narrative that drug offenses are the main reason for mass incarceration is being refuted, even in liberal magazines like Vox.
Liberal publication New Yorker makes the same case as Vox.
Adam Gopnik in New Yorker makes the same case in "Who Belongs in Prison?"
Sample Thesis Statements
Adam Gopnik's "The Caging of America" makes a persuasive case that mass incarceration is a new insidious form of Jim Crow evidenced by ___________________________________, ____________________, ______________________, and ____________________.
While the analogy between Jim Crow 1.0 and Jim Crow 2.0 (mass incarceration) offers some faulty comparisons, by and large the comparison is a compelling and persuasive one when we consider ___________________, __________________, ________________________, and _______________________.
While I will accept some parallels between Jim Crow and mass incarceration, the analogy collapses under close scrutiny when we consider no one forced victims of Jim Crow to deal or take drugs, that Jim Crow existed before Civil Rights laws were passed, and that Jim Crow has been made illegal in our modern society.
The rejection of the analogy between Jim Crow 1.0 and mass incarceration (Jim Crow 2.0) based on the specious argument that we have banned Jim Crow laws is either deliberately misguided or baldly ignorant of Michelle Alexander's research into the insidious ways the current so-called "War on Drugs" oppresses people of color by using coded language, dog whistles, and a prison system that profits off of exploiting mostly young brown and black men.
The War on Drugs narrative to explain America's crisis of mass incarceration is no longer persuasive in light of studies about violence and over-reaching prosecutors who are more responsible for locking people up than the drug war.