My name is Angie Canas, I am currently enrolled at Hartford Public High School Law & Government. This testimony is submitted to you, the Criminal Justice Reform Committee, to express how mass incarceration affects the community around me. Mass incarceration affects many people, especially minority men. They are placed in prisons or jails where the sentence is shorter and await trial or because of a crime. In prison, the sentence is longer due to a serious crime or a state/national crime. This problem of putting people in prison started in the 1970s (Allison). In the 1970s, there were approximately 200,000 to 300,000 people incarcerated (Maure&King). Since then, we now have 2.2 million people incarcerated, or 8 times more than since the 1970s (Maure&King). The national data on race per 100,000 population is interesting to look at. The race with the lowest number of people incarcerated is 412 white men, while the highest race is 2,290 black men. This is a 1:9 ratio, meaning that for every white man incarcerated, 9 black men are also locked up. Among Hispanics, 742 people of his race are incarcerated and this is only national data. Looking at these numbers, you see that the most closeted race is black men. If we look at the CT data, there are 2,535 black men incarcerated and 211 white men as well (Maure&King). That's an incredibly huge difference between the number of people incarcerated. Between the two races, black men are 12 times more likely to be incarcerated than white men. Among Hispanics, it is 1 white man for every 6.6 Hispanic men incarcerated, since the number of people incarcerated for this race is 1,401 (Maure&King). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Michelle Alexander and the film The 13th believe that mass incarceration is a new method of social control over minorities. Michelle Alexander suggests that we are facing the new Jim Crow, which gives people the right to legally separate based on their criminal status. Imprisonment rates began to increase due to the war on drugs. The War on Drugs occurred when more black men began to be arrested more often than other races. Due to the promotion of the war on drugs, we have targeted the sub-castes, the people born there (Allison). This means that the people born there were born to be arrested and locked up further afterwards due to the lack of equal privileges like social class. (WAS NOT HERE TO WATCH THE MOVIE). Now, Stephanie Bibas disagrees with Michelle Alexander. He expresses how the New Jim Crow is wrong, although he admits that the highest American incarceration rate in the world is only 1/20 of the world's population and 25% of the world's prisoners, or 5/20 (Bibas). America's prison system was booming, and liberals said it was due to racism and the war on drugs, particularly the long sentences given to prisoners for nonviolent drug crimes. He says Alexander is wrong about the accusations against people. Only ⅕ of the charges involved drugs (Bibas). So the prison boom is not due to drug-related arrests. Two-thirds of the charges against prisoners are violent crimes and property crimes. Most offenders linked to.