Essay Four (Final): The New Jim Crow
Support, refute, or complicate Michelle Alexander's thesis that the current justice and prison system are perpetuating the old Jim Crow into a new Jim Crow. Use Toulmin or Refutation model.
Because this is your Final, it is a bit longer than your previous typed papers. While they are four pages (1,000 words), this essay is five pages (closer to 1,200 words).
Be sure to have a Works Cited page with no fewer than three sources and be sure one of the sources is from the El Camino College database.
Essay Requirements:
One. Students will express critical viewpoints and develop original thesis-driven arguments in response to social, political, and philosophical issues and/or to works of literature and literary theory. This argumentative essay will be well organized, demonstrate an ability to support a claim using analysis and elements of argumentation, and integrate primary and secondary sources.
Two. The paper should use at least three sources and not over-rely on one main source for most of the information. Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them. Three. This paper will be approximately 5-6 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required. The Works Cited page does NOT count toward length requirement.
Four. Within your argument, address issues of bias, credibility, and relevance.
Five. Analyze and employ logical structural methods such as inductive and deductive reasoning, cause and effect, logos, ethos, and pathos, and demonstrate understanding of formal and informal fallacies in language and thought.
Six. You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.
Seven. You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.
Eight. You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Sample Concession Thesis Statements That Address the Analogy Between Jim Crow 1.0 and Jim Crow 2.0:
One. Support of Michelle Alexander:
While the New Jim Crow comparison to the Old is not a perfect analogy, there are compelling similarities evidenced by ______________, _______________, _______________, and _______________________.
Two. Refutation of Michelle Alexander:
While I concede there are some disturbing parallels between Jim Crow 1.0 and what Michelle Alexander calls the New Jim Crow, the comparison ultimately collapses when we examine _____________, ______________, _______________, and _______________________.
Three. Example of Thesis That Refutes Michelle Alexander
While Alexander makes compelling points about the loss of human rights and the link between degradation of justice in the face of the profit motives behind the disturbing expansion of the incarceration system in the Age of the Drug War, her narrative is an incomplete, highly selective propaganda piece that fails to address the link between drug crime and theft (Proposition 47 and the spike in Los Angeles crime), the demands of many African Americans for more robust police intervention to protect their communities, and the exaggerated analogy between Jim Crow and the alleged “New Jim Crow.”
Four. Example of Thesis That Supports Michelle Alexander
While Alexander’s analogy between Jim Crow 1.0 and the War on Drugs as a form of Jim Crow 2.0 has many flaws, there are enough compelling parallels to make her thesis persuasive, especially when we focus on the profit motive behind incarceration, the racial disparities in prison sentencing, and the loss of constitutional rights as a result of the futile Drug War.
Five. Thesis That Refutes Michelle Alexander
While Alexander makes some compelling points about the need for more drug treatment and making incarceration less profit-driven, her overall narrative is largely a fiction that does a great disservice to American society by demonizing all politicians and cops as money-hungry racists, by ignoring the crimes resulting from drug use, by ignoring how black communities suffer when the police back off from those communities, and by ignoring the role of economic class, not race, as a predictor of crimes that must result in imprisonment if we are to protect law-abiding citizens.
Six. Thesis That Supports Michelle Alexander
While Alexander's argument would be better served to take a more nuanced approach in her portrayal of the police, her overall New Jim Crow narrative is persuasive in light of racial arrest patterns, race-based loss of civil liberties, and the military-like expansion of police powers.
Use Present Verb Tense for Argument Research Paper and Textual Analysis
Study Questions for Chapter 3, 97-139
One. Describe the injustice imposed upon Erma Faye Stewart on page 97. Did she ever get justice? How are millions of the poor vulnerable to this injustice?
We find that African Americans were put into prison just 3 years after the Drug War in the 1980s at a rate of 400% or a quadrupling (98). By 2000 the rate of African American imprisonment was up 26 times or 2,600 percent.
Are black people "2,600 percent more criminal inside," as opponents of Alexander claim. Ridiculous.
It seems reasonable to call this Jim Crow 2.0.
We read on page 98, that although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses are black or Latino.
On page 118 we read that African Americans are six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes. Sounds like Jim Crow to me.
African American youth account for 16 percent of all youth, 28 percent of all juvenile arrests, 35% of the youth waived to adult criminal court, and 58% of youth admitted to state adult prison.
Hypersegregation of the black poor in ghetto communities has made the roundup, police arresting people with no just cause, easy. Rappers call this situation “The Occupation.”
We read on page 128 that Adolph Lyons was stopped for a burned-out taillight and beaten into a loss of consciousness, urinated and defecated on himself, and suffered permanent damage to his larynx. This was the LAPD. Lyons sued but lost. Deadly chokeholds are still a legal practice even though sixteen people have been killed by it.
In New Jersey, we read on page 133, racial minority drivers are 15% but 42% of all stops and 73% of all arrests happen to minorities (New Jersey Turnpike).
Seventy-seven% of all consent searches happen to minorities.
In Maryland, African Americans are 17% of drivers yet 70% are stopped and searched.
In both studies, we see that whites were more likely to be carrying drugs. That’s twice as likely as black people and five times as likely as Latinos.
This racial isolation doesn’t affect white communities and the suburbs and the result is indifference toward those who are unfairly imprisoned, what’s called an “I don’t give a damn” mentality (124).
Two. 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.
Three. What is the circular illogic of racial profiling?
On page 134, we read that cops say, “Our prisons are full of blacks; blacks must be doing all the crime; therefore, we must stop and search blacks.”
In Denver, a 1992 investigation showed that 8 out of 10 people of color in the entire city were on a list of suspected criminals.
Clearly, the studies show that racial minorities are the main targets of stop-and-frisk. This humiliating ritual of dominance and submission recalls Jim Crow (136). And these searches are the gateway to a lifelong spent in the prison system.
From Lesson Two
Lexicon
One. Prison Cash Cow
Two. Reasonable Cause and Fourth Amendment
Three. Forfeiture Law (over billion dollars between 1988-1992)
Four. "Consent search"
Five. Traffic stop trick
Six. "massive bribe" to the police to encourage drug arrests (74)
Seven. Sentencing disparity (drug lords go free; small timers go to prison)
Eight. Legal Counsel Myth: Eighty percent of defendants don't get legal representation. Usually, there is no trial; there's a plea bargain.
Nine. "Closed circuit of perpetual marginality" (95)
Ten. Racial disparity: 80-90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison are African American.
One. 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.
Two. 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.
Three. The author asks on page 72, 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).
Four. Why is a 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.
Five. What other dramatic change 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).
Six. Why is it that 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).
Alexander's Major Claims and Arguments (you should address in your essay's mapping components)
One. The NJC is based on race-neutral language to exert racist control and to make a rich prison empire on the backs of poor black men.
Two. Prisons don't reduce crime. They increase it.
Three. NJC was created by elite whites to appease poor whites.
Four. NJC is a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement merging with the Poor People's Movement (threatening to take more pie from the white elite who needed to break the alliance).
Six. War on Drugs threw away the Fourth Amendment for people of color.
Seven. Poor people don't get legal representation.
Eight. U.S. legal system accommodates white crimes (alcohol, drunk driving (80% of drunk drivers are white men) powder cocaine, marijuana) but prosecutes to the full extent black crimes.
Counterarguments
Here is a legitimate critique from Yale.
Counterargument and rebuttal (in reader comments) of the claim that mass incarceration is the New Jim Crow.
Comments