In The New Jim Crow, by Associate Professor Michelle Alexander, Alexander fights fiercely for her readers to recognize the severity of racism rooted in our social and political systems. She does this by describing how the Jim Crow laws of the past have disguised themselves as a new system of racial oppression: mass incarceration in the war on drugs. Additionally, at the heart of the book, she focuses on three reasons why young black men are more likely to be accused of crimes during and after the civil rights movement and three reasons why they are more likely to be imprisoned . Say no to plagiarism. . Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Young black men were more likely to be accused of crimes for three main reasons. The first reason is due to the aggressive response of Southern governors and law enforcement officials to the civil rights movement. In the late 1950s, Southern conservatives argued that civil rights granted to blacks were directly proportional to the rate and severity of crime in the country. Although in reality this is largely untrue, the FBI has surprisingly reported an increase in crime rates nationwide. For example, street crime has quadrupled and homicide rates have doubled (A, 41). However, what the public did not know about this increase was that it was driven by young adults in the baby boom generation, not young black men (A, 41). Consequently, this stigmatized young black men's relationship with the law, making them more likely to be charged with crimes. Another reason young black men were more likely to be charged with crimes was due to the widely held misconception that black people were most active in abusing and selling drugs, thus creating a racial profile . Although statistically false, this misunderstanding was fostered by the unfair approach police and prosecutors took when identifying the ambiguous identity of a drug user. The police would associate black men and drugs and activate a vicious cycle of false statements and an unfair number of accusations. For example, African Americans made up 80 to 90 percent of drug offenders in prison, but in reality, only 15 percent of African Americans abused drugs (A, 98 and 106). On the other side of the spectrum, white people have been proven 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 used cocaine at a rate seven times that of black students, and that heroin was used by whites at a rate seven times higher than that of blacks (A, 99). Third, Alexander explains why black men were more likely to be charged with crimes when discussing unwarranted searches. While police officers were encouraged to imprison drug addicts, with the war on drugs being a hot topic, consent searches and pretext stops allowed officers to search "reasonable" people when they consented, which was enforced very loosely. As a result, racial profiling and unwarranted searches worked together and many searches against black people were conducted, whether officers realized it or not. For example, more than three thousand bags over a nine-month period were searched by a single officer (A, 64)..