Jim Crow, a series of laws put in place after slavery by wealthy white Americans and used to continue to subordinate African Americans has existed for many years and continues to exist today in a different form, mass incarceration. When initially implemented, Jim Crow laws were a series of anti-black laws that helped separate blacks from whites and kept blacks in a lower social, political, and economic status. Today, the term Jim Crow is used to explain the mass incarcerations of black people since Jim Crow laws were rolled back. Because of mass incarceration, Black people are continually disenfranchised and subordinated due to factors such as inability to obtain housing, suppression of income, and many other factors. Both generations of Jim Crow were implemented through laws or means used by the government to justify the implementation of this unjust treatment of black people. In the first chapter of Alexander, she lays the foundations of the original Jim Crow. With the abolition of slavery in the South, whites began to sense that their economic success would begin to deteriorate. Without the ability to exploit black people and keep them as slaves, it was difficult to find individuals capable of performing these horrible jobs. This also damaged the economic status of wealthy whites, as they were now required to pay individuals for the work they performed. This raises the question of why individuals might be exploited in the first place? Before the Reconstruction era, wealthy white people could violate the rights of black people by not classifying them as humans. With this classification, blacks were not protected by the Constitution because they were not considered "men" and the Constitution clearly states that "all men are... middle of paper... protecting their sons of a severe police force”. treatment. Black people tend to forget that the war on drugs has devastated other families in their communities and silences them out of fear of humiliation. The war on drugs and drug policies were useful tactics that continued to disenfranchise black men and keep them isolated from society, allowing upper-class whites to continue to dominate society. society as they have done for centuries. Through the term Jim Crow is not one. that we see on a daily basis referring to the disenfranchisement of black people in today's society, it still exists and is in its own right. Targeting black people with drugs allows for racial discrimination without using classification as a public basis. Although one could argue that drugs are the problem, race is a consistent trait that is common to all cases of mass incarceration..