Prison Industrial Complex

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New Jim Crow [VIDEO]

 

New Jim Crow

New Jim Crow

“Legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues persuasively we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

Jim Crow and legal racial segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration as a system of social control.

More African Americans are under correctional control today than were enslaved in 1850

Alexander reviews American racist history from the colonies to the Clinton administration, delineating its deliberate transformation into the war on drugs. She provides analysis of the effect of this mass incarceration upon former inmates who will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives, denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Most provocatively, she reveals how both the move toward colorblindness and affirmative action may blur our vision of injustice. She spoke at Riverside Church in Manhattan May 21, 2011.

Michelle Alexander is a longtime civil rights advocate and litigator. She won a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship and now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Mortiz College of Law at Ohio State University.

Alexander served for several years as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, and subsequently directed the Civil Rights Clinics at Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor. Alexander is a former law clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court, and has appeared as a commentator on CNN, MSNBC, DemocracyNow! and NPR. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is her first book.”

 

Audio: Riverside Church, Camera: Joe Friendly

Ready to learn more?
Here is Angela Davis on the topic.

Community Village‘s insight:

 

I love these women

#MichelleAlexander #AngelaDavis

 

See on www.youtube.com

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Incarceration in America: The Inside Story

 

“BOOKD profiles, The New Jim Crow, legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s breakthrough book about the rise of mass incarceration in America. Alexander agues that “by targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control.

See as a Yale Law Professor, Community Activists, and hip hop legend Talib Kweli debate and discuss this provocative and important book.”
See on www.youtube.com

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Corporations Reap Billions from Mass Incarceration Pt 2

What companies are profiting off of prisoners and mass incarceration?

 

Community Village‘s insight:

 

The New Jim Crow

 

So much for freedom in America.

 

@getgln

See on www.youtube.com

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THE NEW JIM CROW Online documentary

“Michelle Alexander, highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University, and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”

 

Community Village‘s insight:

 

I’m reading her EXCELLENT book “The New Jim Crow” on Kindle and tweeting quotes from it.

 

@getgln

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Holder seeks to avert mandatory minimum sentences for some low-level drug offenders

“We must face the reality that, as it stands, our system is, in too many ways, broken,” Holder said. “And with an outsized, unnecessarily large prison population, we need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, to deter and to rehabilitate — not merely to warehouse and to forget.”

 

“A vicious cycle of poverty, criminality and incarceration traps too many Americans and weakens too many communities,” Holder said Monday. (Excerpts of his ­prepared remarks were provided Sunday to The Washington Post.) He added that “many aspects of our criminal justice system may actually exacerbate these problems rather than alleviate them.”

 

It is clear that “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for no truly good law enforcement reason,” Holder said. “We cannot simply prosecute or incarcerate our way to becoming a safer nation,” he added later in the speech.

 

Holder is calling for a change in Justice Department policies to reserve the most severe penalties for drug offenses for serious, high-level or violent drug traffickers. He has directed his 94 U.S. attorneys across the country to develop specific, locally tailored guidelines for determining when federal charges should be filed and when they should not.

 

Community Village‘s insight:

Progress!

See on www.washingtonpost.com