Non-fic: The New Jim Crow - Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander

Question 1

What forms of discrimination are suddenly legal once you’re ‘labelled a felon’? E_ D_ H_ D_ D_ of r_ to v_ D_ of e_ op_ D_ of f_ s_ Exc_ from j_ s_

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 1

What forms of discrimination are suddenly legal once you’re ‘labelled a felon’? / employment discrimination \ housing discrimination \ denial of right to vote\ denial of educational opportunities\ denial of food stamps\ exclusion from jury service

Question 2

we have not ended racial caste in America; we have m_ r_ i_.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 2

… merely redesigned it.

Question 3

The US penal population has exploded in less than 30 years from around _____ to more than _____.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 3

The US penal population has exploded in less than 30 years from around 300,000 to more than 2,000,000.

Question 4

What is unique and astonishing about USA among developing countries?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 4

Highest rate of incarceration in the world.

Question 5

What is estimate about race and incarceration rates in Washington D.C?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 5

3 out of 4 young black men can expect to serve time in prisons.

Question 6

Between 1960 and 1990 official crime rates were nearly identical in Finland, Germany and USA. What happened to incarceration rates?

What is the key point? 

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 6

Finland – fell 60% Germany – stable USA – quadrupled No obvious link between frequency of crime and incarceration rates.

Question 7

Next closet country in terms of incarceration rates?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 7

Russia

Question 8

What were criminologists in the 1970s predicting?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 8

That prison would ‘fade away’…

Question 9

What does ‘racial caste’ mean in terms of this book?

• a s………. r….. group locked into an i……. p……. by l.. and c…… .

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 9

• a stigmatised racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom.

Question 10

What is Obama’s election an example of? N_ e_

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 10

Necessary exceptionalism

Question 11

What are the ‘three racialised systems of control’?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 11

mass incarceration Jim Crow Slavery

Question 12

Why were Africans viewed as the ideal choice as group to slaves (rather than Indians or Europeans)?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 12

Fear of raids by Indian tribes led plantation owners to grasp for an alternative source of free labor.

European immigrants were also deemed poor candidates for slavery, not because of their race, but rather because they were in short supply and enslavement would, quite naturally, interfere with voluntary immigration to the new colonies.

Plantation owners thus viewed Africans, who were relatively powerless, as the ideal slaves.

Question 13

What happened to the budgets of federal law enforcement agencies in the early 1980s?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 13

Practically overnight the budgets of federal law enforcement agencies soared. Between 1980 and 1984, FBI antidrug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million. 73 Department of Defense antidrug allocations increased from $33 million in 1981 to $1,042 million in 1991. During that same period, DEA antidrug spending grew from $86 to $1,026 million, and FBI antidrug allocations grew from $38 to $181 million. 74 By contrast, funding for agencies responsible for drug treatment, prevention, and education was dramatically reduced.

Question 14

What is the name for the division of power between the states and the federal government?

What institution did it protect?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 14

Federalism—the division of power between the states and the federal government—was the device employed to protect the institution of slavery and the political power of slaveholding states.

Question 15

What emergency emerged after the Civil War?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 15

Add to all this the sudden presence of 4 million newly freed slaves, and the picture becomes even more complicated. Southern whites, Woodward explains, strongly believed that a new system of racial control was clearly required, but it was not immediately obvious what form it should take.

Question 16

What advances were made in the reconstruction era?

Which two what? (Clue - doesn’t add up to)

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 16

Ultimately, the black codes were overturned, and a slew of federal civil rights legislation protecting the newly freed slaves was passed during the relatively brief but extraordinary period of black advancement known as the Reconstruction Era. The impressive legislative achievements of this period include the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery; the Civil Rights Act of 1866, bestowing full citizenship upon African Americans; the Fourteenth Amendment, prohibiting states from denying citizens due process and “equal protection of the laws”; the Fifteenth Amendment, providing that the right to vote should not be denied on account of race; and the Ku Klux Klan Acts, which, among other things, declared interference with voting a federal offense and the violent infringement of civil rights a crime.

Question 17

What was convict leasing?

When was it happening?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 17

Convict leasing in the United States was widespread in the South during the Reconstruction Period (1865–1877) after the end of the Civil War, when many Southern legislatures were ruled by majority coalitions of blacks and Radical Republicans, and Union generals acted as military governors.

The aggressive enforcement of these criminal offenses opened up an enormous market for convict leasing, in which prisoners were contracted out as laborers to the highest private bidder. Douglas Blackmon, in Slavery by Another Name , describes how tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested during this period, many of them hit with court costs and fines, which had to be worked off in order to secure their release. With no means to pay off their “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, farms, plantations, and dozens of corporations throughout the South.

Question 18

What was the practical effect of Jim Crow?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 18

By the turn of the twentieth century, every state in the South had laws on the books that disenfranchised blacks and discriminated against them in virtually every sphere of life, lending sanction to a racial ostracism that extended to schools, churches, housing, jobs, restrooms, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, orphanages, prisons, funeral homes, morgues, and cemeteries. Politicians competed with each other by proposing and passing ever more stringent, oppressive, and downright ridiculous legislation (such as laws specifically prohibiting blacks and whites from playing chess together). The public symbols and constant reminders of black subjugation were supported by whites across the political spectrum, though the plight of poor whites remained largely unchanged. For them, the racial bribe was primarily psychological. The new racial order, known as Jim Crow—a term apparently derived from a minstrel show character—was regarded as the “final settlement,” the “return to sanity,” and “the permanent system.”

Question 19

What signalled the end of home–rule in the south?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 19

Brown v. Board of Education was unique, however. It signaled the end of “home rule” in the South with respect to racial affairs.

Question 20

Describe 1963.

15,000 mpenIodsIr

20,000 reAtssr

1000 esDgeganoitre roptsest

Kennedy commits to..?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 20

1961 - 1963 20,000 arrests of civil right protestors

1963 - 15,000 imprisoned / 1000 desegregation protests in 100 cities

1963, President Kennedy commits to Civil Rights Bill

After assassination, President Johnson professed his commitment to the goal of “the full assimilation of more than twenty million Negroes into American life,” and ensured the passage of comprehensive civil rights legislation.

Question 21

What was the alternative rallying cry of Conservatives?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 21

Proponents of racial hierarchy found they could install a new racial caste system without violating the law or the new limits of acceptable political discourse, by demanding “law and order” rather than “segregation forever.”

Question 22

Examples of colourblind language that actually functioned in a racist way?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 22

a Chicago “welfare queen” with “80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards,” whose “tax–free income alone is over $150,000.” 67 The term “welfare queen” became a not–so–subtle code for “lazy, greedy, black ghetto mother.” The food stamp program, in turn, was a vehicle to let “some fellow ahead of you buy a T–bone steak,” while “you were standing in a checkout line with your package of hamburger.” 68 These highly racialized appeals, targeted to poor and working–class whites, were nearly always accompanied by vehement promises to be tougher on crime

Question 23

What did Civil Rights Act 1964 do?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander

Answer 23

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 formally dismantled the Jim Crow system of discrimination in public accommodations, employment, voting, education, and federally financed activities.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 arguably had even greater scope.