Despite the election of the country's first African American president, racial divisions still exist today. (Dunn). Recent reports, social media, and breaking news have been showing racism continues to thrive in America. Fed up with the law, Afro-Americans are protesting for their rights. Media's sensationalism of police brutality has brought undo attention to racial profiling in America.
"The chain of radicalized terror that spanned during slavery, lynching, and police whippings remains unbroken as the brutalization of minorities is routinely practiced in today's criminal justice system." Looking back in history, during the same period as the West makes legal structure to control and regulate blacks in the New World, there was a shift in types of punishment and social control in Europe and the United States in years preceding the Civil War. In the "carceral system" the penal institution stands in the center. Agents of this system were to normalize and control the elements of society that were deviant. The racial layers of American society contained the principles of white superiority and black inferiority. Blacks were defined as deviant and the police were in charge of social control over the black population. Measures had already been taken to institutionalize slavery which was a 100 year period between 1660 and 1760. Slave codes were made to regulate the growing black population. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the constitution were intended to end slavery. The legal doctrine "separate but equal" enforced segregation. The whites feared freed blacks. 2,060 blacks were lynched between 1882 and 1903. 6,000 lynchings of black men and women were recorded between 1870 and 1960. The lynching was made at the hands of police. In the South between the Reconstruction and the beginning of the twentieth century, the blacks made up 70 to 95 percent of prison population.
