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Azayleah Delgado
Professor O’Donnell
English 20
02/23/2017
Literature Review
The United States of America makes up about 5% of the world population, but yet is
responsible for about a quarter of the world’s incarceration population. According to the US Bureau of
Labor Statistics, since 1980 the US prison rate has multiplied, over 2 million citizens are incarcerated in
either prison, local and county jails. Mass incarceration is one of the biggest social and political crisis
we have as a society today but the main concern is figuring out the root of the problem, how this came
to be. Michelle Alexander and John Pfaff are two well-known scholars have published their own book
that takes on two separate approaches on why this might be happening.
Michelle Alexander, is a highly commended civil rights lawyer, advocate, legal scholar, and a
graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University. In 2005, Alexander won a Soros Justice
Fellowship which fueled the writing of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness. The New Jim Crow has not only been featured in national radio and television media
outlets, but it also won the 2011 NAACP Image Award for best nonfiction.
In this book Alexander explains the issue of mass incarceration, which is a particular societal
criminal justice issue and she does this by covering all aspects of the problem. The point of the book is
not to provide detailed methods to “solve” this crisis, but Alexander does lay out several matters that
will need to be changed: the private prison system, law enforcement, profiling and incentives, and our
public consciousness. Alexander presents statistics and narratives to reveal the racial inequality of
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arrest rates, prosecution, sentencing, and incarceration for drug offenses Alexander’s proposition is
that mass incarceration is metaphorically, the New Jim Crow.
Alexander brings to attention that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it” (Alexander, 2010, pg. 2). A major difference, however between the Jim Crow system
and mass incarceration today is where the racial intention lies. Jarvis Cotton’s great–grandfather,
grandfather, and father could not vote due to the Klan violence or poll taxes. Cotton cannot either
because he is labeled as a felon. Previous systems of racialized social control in American history were
explicitly racist. Slavery, “Whites only” signs, and segregated lunch counters in the past. Today the War
on Drugs is concealed racism. In the book Alexander states that millions of men (particularly black) are
