Essay Questions

How does Jones delineate the impacts of incarceration in this novel?

In this novel, Jones uncovers the remarkable impact mass incarceration has on the lives of black Americans. The immovably drawn in story reveals how incarceration can wreck families, setting them at a social drawback from which it is hard to recuperate. The novel further prescribes that detainment is a ruinous power with insignificant rational associations with value, and which achieves more to hurt society than it does to protect it.

What is the historical context of this novel?

Tayar Jones’ An American Marriage was published when stresses over the unfairness of mass incarceration were at the front line of civil rights discussions. In the course of 40 years the U.S. jail populace has created to make up about a fourth of the world's incarcerated individuals. An unbalanced number of those prisoners are black men, who are on various occasions more probable than white men to be incarcerated. This is generally the eventual outcome of racial tendency in policing, harsher condemning, and financial evildoing.

The impacts of such preference is not restricted to those people set in the slammer however reaches out to prevent the development and prosperity of the families and communities of those incarcerated. Across the nation protests began by contemporary social equity groups like Black Lives Matter have caused expanded to notice the issue of racial incongruities in mass incarceration and the manners by which the U.S. prison framework adds to a cycle of destitution and bad behavior inside systems of concealing.