Rhetorical Strategies and Argument Analysis

Nick Miller

POST #2

Rhetorical Strategies and Argument Analysis

Michelle Alexander's argument in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is relatively simple; racial discrimination throughout America's criminal justice system is rampant, and the system is built to target African Americans to maintain the racial caste system that was pervasive before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

Overall, I thought that Alexander did much better concerning her inclusion of specific evidence to support her arguments in this section of the book. I may not have agreed with everything she wrote, which I will get to later in this post. As someone who is generally skeptical of the notion that America's criminal justice system is racist, though, I appreciated Alexander's inclusion of tangible statements that I could break down and analyze.  

Concerning Alexander's rhetorical strategies, I felt that this broadened the scope of people she could present her argument without being dismissed as a fanatic. It is much more difficult for people to argue against specific evidence. In essence, it requires much more careful and complex thought to break down claims when those claims are supported by evidence than to dismiss a general statement that is not. In this chapter, Alexander provided a plethora of evidence to support her claims. 

For example, she begins the chapter on page 98 with concrete evidence explaining that the vast majority of drug offenders sent to prison are African American (Alexander, 98). I appreciated this evidence, and it instantly made me more receptive to her racial arguments, because I know that African Americans only make up 13% of the population in the United States, so 80-90 percent seems like a high number.  

While I believe that there are factors that must be controlled for (that I read about in subsequent research) that may explain some of this disparity, I agree that it is something that needs to be investigated - and as far as rhetorical strategies are concerned, I found that Alexander's inclusion of statistics throughout pages 98 and 99 was beneficial.  

Where I begin to disagree with Alexander's argument, however, is also page 99. While I believe that her rhetorical strategies are effective, I don't agree with the overall argument or her use of statistics in this section of the book. On page 99, she states that African Americans are incarcerated at "vastly disproportionate rates," given their percentage of the population, which is true. She then cites evidence to prove that this is true, none of which I objected to.  

What I found objectionable is Alexander's attribution of those disparities to fervent racism in America's police departments and courtrooms. I suspected that there were probably more factors contributing to the story than just race, so I explored a 1995 Bureau of Justice Statistics report on the matter. It confirmed Alexander's point that an outsize share of people arrested for drug crimes were African American - roughly 40%.  

However, the authors of the study were cautious about attributing that statistic to race alone. They controlled for other factors, such as type of drug used, location of the use, and whether or not the specific racial demographic repeatedly used the substance. According to the report, African Americans were more likely to use Heroin than whites, which places them at a higher risk of arrest for drug possession or distribution than marijuana, for example (Langan).  

This means that if a disproportionate number of African Americans use Heroin, for example, they are more likely to be caught and arrested, than a white person is while smoking weed. The BJS report provides greater context to a claim that Alexander made in her book, which was that African American students are less likely than white students. Alexander's statistics only examined students, while the BJS report examined everyone. In my eyes, the BJS report is more trustworthy in this instance, because it captures a broader snapshot of the U.S. drug picture, and is, therefore, more likely to be applicable across more significant numbers.  

In Patrick Langan's opinion (the author of the BJS study), the frequency of use of a specific substance also skews arrest and prosecution numbers.  

He states, "A well established criminological fact is that the more crimes a person commits, the more likely that person is to be arrested. Accordingly, frequent drug users are more at risk of arrest than infrequent users. Concerning the frequency of use, the races differ in ways that place black drug users at greater risk of interview."  

He then states, "Among black drug users, 54% reported using drugs at least monthly, and 32% reported using them weekly. Such frequent drug use was less common among white drug users. Among white users, 39% reported using drugs monthly, and 20% reported using them weekly."

These statistics indicate that African Americans are more likely than whites to use drugs frequently, meaning that they are at a higher risk of arrest and subsequent prosecution (Langan). This explains at least some of the racial gap in incarceration, as white drug users are often able to circumvent arrest and prosecution because they are less likely to be repeat offenders (Langan).  

Langan also considers the place of use to be of significant importance when determining the risk of arrest. He states that drug abuse that is constituted in large urban centers is much more likely to be caught and prosecuted than abuse that is concentrated in rural areas. Because Blacks represent an outsize percentage of the inner city population, it puts them at a statistically higher risk of being caught (Langan).  

At most, Langan states, these factors control for 13% of the disparity, which leaves a phantom 13% to be accounted for. But Langan also says this isn't necessarily attributable to race.  

He states, "Suppose, for example, that criminally active persons who use drugs (both whites and blacks alike) tend not to admit drug use when asked in a household survey. This is not wild supposition, given that, in the National Institute of Justice's Drug Use Forecast survey, about half of arrested suspects testing positive for drug use were drug-use-deniers(they denied using drugs but urinalysis indicated otherwise). 

Although arrested whites and arrested blacks were about equally likely to be drug-use-deniers, these results nevertheless have implications for the SAMHSA survey.

 A larger fraction of the black population than the white population consists of criminally active persons and, therefore, a larger fraction of the black population than the white population would consist of criminally active persons who use drugs but deny it.

 Consequently, the SAMHSA survey would probably understate the difference between whites and blacks in terms of drug use. Whether the effect of such drug-use-denial among criminally active persons is large enough to account for the unexplained 13 percent is not known, but research on the topic should pursue this possibility."  

Given this evidence, I agree that the 13% should be investigated vigorously with a specific focus on potential racial discrimination. Still, until it is thoroughly examined, I think it would be wrong to conclude in the absence of evidence that it is based on race.  

Now that my criticisms are out of the way, I would like to focus on the areas in which Alexander and I agree. On page 131, she cites a supreme court ruling, United States vs. Brignoni-Ponce which states that the police may use racial profiling as probable cause when determining whether a crime will be committed. I see this as a clear and blatant example of racial discrimination in the justice system that needs to be reformed.  

This piece of evidence is compelling in the context of Alexander's larger argument, which asserts that there is bias in the criminal justice system. I see this as a great example of that bias that should be overturned, and given the fact that I agree with her, I won't elaborate.  

Overall, I again thought that there were areas that I agreed with Alexander and regions that I disagreed with her. From a rhetoric perspective, I thought that Alexander used a perfect amount of data to support her claims. As a person with, as Ms. LaClair put it, "a healthy dose of skepticism," I always appreciate tangible, large scale research that I can grasp onto and analyze from an empirical perspective.  

With regard to Alexander's overall argument that the criminal justice system has an intrinsic bias against blacks, I thought that this section did a better job of proving that point than the previous section did.