In "The Cruel Hand," Michelle Alexander begins to dive into the lives of ex-offenders - or ex-criminals - as they try to return to a life without bars. Throughout this chapter Ms. Alexander does a great job of using emotional appeal to demonstrate how ex-criminals are ushered into a new form of underclass akin to those of black citizens during the Jim Crow era. The stigmas that come with being an ex-criminal, Alexander states, have become as much of a detriment in every aspect of an ex-offenders' attempt to re-join society as the skin color of blacks post slavery. Once out of prison, ex-criminal are not only faced with the realities of finding everything essential to life: employment, a stable residence, and reconnecting with family, they are also faced with social neglect, copious amounts of legal fees, no government aid, and protocols seemingly designed to send them back to prison. While the realities ex-criminals face after paying their debt to society are not color based, they are just as harsh as those faced by blacks post slavery, Alexander therefore correctly likens the struggles of these ex-criminals to those of free slaves during the Jim Crow era. .
Through the use of strong evidence and language Alexander begins to immediately demonstrate how both the government and the judicial system treat ex-criminals with the same disdain and carelessness they once showed against blacks during the Jim Crow era. One of the first means by which the U.S. government has begun to treat ex-criminals like second class citizens is by effectively allowing housing discrimination. Through legislation like the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 and the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998, the U.S. government has allowed public housing agencies to deny housing and evict not only felons, "but people believed to be using drugs or abusing alcohol-whether they have been convicted of a crime or not" (145).
