African Americans And Criminal Justice

This encyclopedia comprises descriptive essays documenting the ways in which people of African descent have been victimized by oppressive laws enacted by local, state, and federal authorities in the United States. It presents a frank and comprehensive view of how Americans of African descent have come to be viewed as synonymous with criminality, representing an essential learning resource for all American citizens, regardless of race or age.

This book examines the role of the public and policy makers in enabling the race problem in the American criminal justice system.

Twenty-nine collected essays represent a critical history of Shakespeare's play as text and as theater, beginning with Samuel Johnson in 1765, and ending with a review of the Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1991. The criticism centers on three aspects of the play: the love/friendship debate.

This book argues that a theory of crime specific to the African American experience is justified by qualitative and quantitative data, not just because of the disproportionately higher percentage of African Americans (in the U.S. population) who are offenders, but also because of the vastly higher percentage of Black Americans who are non-offenders.

Every white southerner understood what keeping African Americans "down" meant and what it did not mean. It did not mean going to court; it did not mean relying on the law. It meant vigilante violence and lynching. Looking at Vicksburg, Mississippi, Roots of Disorder traces the origins of these terrible attitudes to the day-to-day operations of local courts. In Vicksburg, white exploitation of black labor through slavery evolved into efforts to use the law to define blacks' place in society, setting the stage for widespread tolerance of brutal vigilantism. Fed by racism and economics, whites' extralegal violence grew in a hothouse of more general hostility toward law and courts. Roots of Disorder shows how the criminal justice system itself plays a role in shaping the attitudes that encourage vigilantism. "Delivers what no other study has yet attempted. . . . Waldrep's book is one of the first systematically to use local trial data to explore questions of society and culture." -- Vernon Burton, author of "A Gentleman and an Officer": A Social and Military History of James B. Griffin's Civil War

Does justice exist for Blacks in America? This comprehensive compilation of essays documents the historical and contemporary impact of the law and criminal justice system on people of African ancestry in the United States. African Americans and Criminal Justice: An Encyclopedia comprises descriptive essays documenting the ways in which people of African descent have been victimized by oppressive laws enacted by local, state, and federal authorities in the United States. The entries also describe how Blacks became disproportionately represented in national crime statistics, largely through their efforts to resist legalized oppression in early American history, and present biographies of famous and infamous Black criminal suspects and victims throughout early American history and in contemporary times. Providing coverage of law and criminal justice practices from the precolonial period, including the introduction of African slaves, up to practices in modern-day America, this encyclopedia presents a frank and comprehensive view of how Americans of African descent have come to be viewed as synonymous with criminality. This book represents an essential learning resource for all American citizens, regardless of race or age.

Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.