[JoshelleJames]

Part 1
Hello, my name is Joshelle James I am 19 years old, turning 20 years old April 22nd, which makes me a Taurus. I was born in America, but my parents are from the Caribbean. My mother is from the island St. Vincent, and my father were born in Guyana but he grew up in Trinidad, and then later moved to St. Vincent where he met my father. My name is a unique name in where I got the (JOS) from my father’s name Joseph, and the (HELLE) from my mother’s name Michelle. They were very creative for this. I decided to take this course of Intro to Journalism because my major is Broadcast Journalism. But I am taking Liberal Arts in City tech, but will transfer to York College to begin my studies. In fact when I seen this course, I was so excited.

Part 2
Being a citizen should be a great advantage you have much more privileges as in the right to vote, to work and live in the country, permission to own real estate, and right to travel. There may be pros where you have to pay taxes. A citizen of a country is people that earn and deserve every right that is given by the government. These people add to the welfare and economic surface of the country. Any body can be a resident of a country by living there, but not everyone is a citizen, you have to go through legal documentation, which can be born rights which given to you when you are born in that country. Or thru marriage, which that person must be a citizen already, or by length of being in a country for over a certain time you, can gain residential when working and adding to the country, and etc. I am so familiar to the word citizenship from people from the Caribbean also known as West Indies, most of them do not have their citizenship or what they will call their papers because being born in another country. This is a con because they couldn’t go back to their original country for vacation or even if it was a family emergency, because they wouldn’t be allowed back inside the United States. So being this they force them selves into marriages with citizens or they even make an agreement with a citizen to pay them to marry them just for their citizenship.

Part 3
“It may be surprising to some that the drug crime was declining not rising, when a drug war was declared….. Sociologists have frequently observed that government use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns. Michael Tonry explains in Thinking About Crime: “Governments decide how much punishment they want, and these decisions are in no simple way related to crime rates.” ….. Although crime rates in the United States have not been markedly higher than those of the Western countries, the rate of incarceration has spared in the United States while it has remained stable or declined in other countries.” (Introduction page 7)

Literally: Basically this passage is saying that the government was taking advantage of the people especially colored, because a war on drugs was declared when the drug crime was declining, which is a total irony. Michelle Alexander is realizes that millions of Americans are targeted by the War on Drugs (1982) for no reason. They Americans that were targeted was mostly black and they also faced plenty discrimination. She is basically stating that the colorblind drug policies are directed towards the drug use, which is she disagrees with because clearly the colored people are facing the harsh penalties. In a previous paragraph she stated that in less than thirty years, the U.S penalty population exploded from around 300,00 to more than 2 million , which was ridiculous because now he U.S have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Alexander believes that the War on Drugs was a plan by the government to destroy the black people. She is also saying that the criminal justice system is racist in many ways.

Intellectually: This message makes me think of how when living in a country you are basically ruled by the government, because you have no decisions or opinions in the laws. This makes me think how unfair life can be and how the colored people were treated unfairly back then, especially when they couldn’t even speak up for what is right.

Emotionally: This passage makes me very angry that the government basically takes control of us, and they have the right to do anything they want to us and we have no say against so. Especially when Michael Tonry states that “the government decides how much punishments they want, and these decisions are in no simple way related to crime rates”. That just makes me sick because how can you just punish people for no reason especially when the drug crime rates where decreasing and how crime rates were less then other countries, but our incarceration rate was way more then theirs. This is just ridiculous.