Kevin Medina - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Kevin Medina
Queer Cats Journal of LGBTQ Studies, 2018
K e v i n M e di n a Br i a n Ngu y e n I was dehuman[ized] by the lack of empathy prison officia... more K e v i n M e di n a Br i a n Ngu y e n I was dehuman[ized] by the lack of empathy prison officials have towards victims of sexual assault, potential victims, inmate['s] safety in general. Inmates are looked at and treated as subhuman across the board. If an incident can be covered, it will be. If it can be ignored, it will be.-As cited in No Escape, Male Rape in US Prisons (2011). Why is there a prison rape epidemic? In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that the criminal justice system has essentially become the United States' new racial caste system. Through the systematic persecution and prosecution of mainly black bodies, beginning with the Reagan administration's supposed "War on Drugs," the prison population exploded starting in the 1980s, (over) filling prisons with nonwhites. This system of criminalizing racial minorities results from a distinct inequality of criminalization: despite proportional rates of drug use across ethnicities, African Americans see higher incarceration rates of any other ethnicity and experience harsher punishments for similar violations. 1 Beyond the war on drugs, other historically disenfranchised communities, including individuals of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latina/o descent, immigrants, Native Americans, and LGBT individuals are victimized as the result of overt and more subtle collusion of systematic practices of racism, classism, transphobia,
Queer Cats Journal of LGBTQ Studies, 2018
K e v i n M e di n a Br i a n Ngu y e n I was dehuman[ized] by the lack of empathy prison officia... more K e v i n M e di n a Br i a n Ngu y e n I was dehuman[ized] by the lack of empathy prison officials have towards victims of sexual assault, potential victims, inmate['s] safety in general. Inmates are looked at and treated as subhuman across the board. If an incident can be covered, it will be. If it can be ignored, it will be.-As cited in No Escape, Male Rape in US Prisons (2011). Why is there a prison rape epidemic? In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that the criminal justice system has essentially become the United States' new racial caste system. Through the systematic persecution and prosecution of mainly black bodies, beginning with the Reagan administration's supposed "War on Drugs," the prison population exploded starting in the 1980s, (over) filling prisons with nonwhites. This system of criminalizing racial minorities results from a distinct inequality of criminalization: despite proportional rates of drug use across ethnicities, African Americans see higher incarceration rates of any other ethnicity and experience harsher punishments for similar violations. 1 Beyond the war on drugs, other historically disenfranchised communities, including individuals of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latina/o descent, immigrants, Native Americans, and LGBT individuals are victimized as the result of overt and more subtle collusion of systematic practices of racism, classism, transphobia,