In The New Jim Crow, by Associate Professor Michelle Alexander, Alexander fights resolutely for his readers to recognize the severity of racism embedded in our social and political systems. It does so by describing how the Jim Crow laws of the past have disguised themselves as a new racially oppressive system: mass incarceration in the war on drugs. Additionally, in the middle portion of the book, he focuses on three reasons why young black men are more likely to be charged with crimes during and after the Civil Rights Movement and three reasons why they are more likely to be incarcerated. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Young black men were more likely to be charged with crimes for three main reasons. The first reason is due to the aggressive reaction of Southern governors and law enforcement towards the civil rights movement. In the late 1950s, Southern conservatives argued that the civil rights afforded to blacks were directly proportional to the rate and severity of crime in the nation. While in reality this is largely false, the FBI has surprisingly reported increases in national crime rates. For example, street crime has quadrupled and the homicide rate has doubled (A, 41). However, what the public did not know about this increase was that it was due to young adults of the baby boom generation, and not young blacks (A, 41). As a result, this stigmatized the relationship between young black men and the law, thus increasing the likelihood that they would be charged with crime. Another reason why black youths were more likely to be charged with crimes was due to the widespread misconception that blacks were the most active in drug abuse and dealing, thus racially profiling. Although statistically false, what fueled this misconception was the unfair approach taken by police officers and prosecutors when identifying the ambiguous identity of a drug addict. Police officers would associate black men with drugs and activate a vicious cycle of false statements and an unfair amount of charges. For example, African Americans made up 80 to 90 percent of drug offenders, but in reality only 15 percent of African Americans abused drugs (A, 98 and 106). On the other end of the spectrum, white people have been shown to abuse drugs at a much higher rate than black people. In 2000, for example, a study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse suggested that white students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, and that heroin is abused by whites at seven times the rate. compared to that of blacks. A, 99). Third, Alexander addresses why Black men were more likely to be charged with crimes when discussing unwarranted searches. Since police officers were incentivized to imprison drug users because the war on drugs was a hot topic, consent searches and pretext stops allowed officers to search “reasonable” people when consent was given, which was enforced in very approximate way. As a result, racial profiling and unwarranted searches worked together, and large amounts of searches were conducted against people of color, whether officers realized it or not. For example, more than three thousand bags in a nine-month period were searched by a single officer (A, 64). Unfortunately it got even worse. In 1984, Drug Enforcement.