The Long Term Consequences Of Incarceration On African...

Chapter II: Literature Review In his pointed analysis of urban life in the United States, sociologist Elijah Anderson (2013) posits that public awareness in America is fundamentally color-coded in that white skin is commonly associated with trustworthiness and civility while black skin tends to epitomize crime and incivility. In a country where more than a third of black men in their twenties are under state control at any given time, official criminality is not only attached to individual offenders but also to an entire social group (Pettit Western, 2004; Roberts, 2004). For poor, undereducated black men, who represent the fastest growing segment of the nation’s prison population, incarceration is a common and almost predictable life experience (Roberts, 2004). It is our hypothesis that by effectively eroding several critical keystones of normative functioning, discriminatory policing and imprisonment creates a cyclical pathway for black men to return to the criminal justice system. This chapter reviews and evaluates the existing research on the long-term consequences of incarceration on African American men, focusing specifically on a) economic opportunities and mobility, b) social networks and connections, and c) civic and social citizenship. Economic Opportunities/Mobility Of the roughly seven hundred thousand individuals released from prison each year, a large majority are young men with less than a college education (Pager, Western Sugie, 2009). Of these formerShow MoreRelatedThe Problem Of The War On Drugs1638 Words   |  7 Pages The War on Drugs plays a major part in the incarceration of African-Americans. In the â€Å"New Jim Crow† reading the (3) CIA admits to helping smuggle contrabands into communities heavily populated by people of color in order to disrupt and immobilize African-American movements. Crack and heroin were the most popular drugs smuggled into these communities due to their highly addictive and immobilizing nature. 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