Michelle Alexander famous quotes

All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking ***** in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Mistake #Marijuana #Law

The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black community itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Fate #Justice #People

The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Punishment #Justice #Prevention

Since the nation's founding, African Americans repeatedly have been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die, but then are reborn in new form, tailored to the needs and constraints of the time.
-- Michelle Alexander

#African American #Crow #Slavery

A new race-neutral language was developed for appealing to old racist sentiments, a language accompanied by a political movement that succeeded in putting the vast majority of backs back in their place. Proponents of racial hierarchy found they could install a new racial caste system without violating the law or the new limits of acceptable political discourse, by demanding 'law and order' rather than 'segregation forever'.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Race #Order #Law

Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination - employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service - are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and largely less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Educational #Opportunity #Men

We have avoided in recent years talking openly and honestly about race out of fear that it will alienate and polarize. In my own view, it’s our refusal to deal openly and honestly with race that leads us to keep repeating these cycles of exclusion and division, and rebirthing a caste-like system that we claim we’ve left behind
-- Michelle Alexander

#Race #Views #Talking

Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Mean #Men #Race

No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid
-- Michelle Alexander

#Country #Black #Population

The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Men #Black #Population

Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. There are millions of African-Americans now cycling in and out of prisons and jails or under correctional control. In major American cities today, more than half of working-age African-American men are either under correctional control or branded felons and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.
-- Michelle Alexander

#War #Men #Cities

The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and change as they are challenged.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Political #Hierarchy #Kind

If we continue to tell ourselves the popular myths about racial progress or, worse yet, if we say to ourselves that the problem of mass incarceration is just too big, too daunting for us to do anything about and that we should instead direct our energies to battles that might be more easily won, history will judge us harshly. A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Rights #Judging #Progress

Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Punishment #Government #Tools

The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.
-- Michelle Alexander

#War #Unique #Opportunity

My great crime wasn't refusing to represent an innocent man; my great crime was imagining that there was some path to racial justice that did not include those we view as 'guilty'.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Men #Views #Justice

The fact that more than half of the young black men in any large American city are currently under the control of the criminal justice system (or saddled with criminal records) is not - as many argue - just a symptom of poverty or poor choices, but rather evidence of a new racial caste system at work.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Men #Cities #Justice

We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it
-- Michelle Alexander

#America #Castes

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
-- Michelle Alexander

#Crow #Age #Mass Incarceration

Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Race #Law #Crow

If you ask for good schools, you aren't likely to get them. If you ask for jobs or economic investment, you won't get that either. But what we have learned, is that the one thing that poor folks of color can ask for and get are Police & Prisons.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Jobs #School #Color

More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space not unlike Jim Crow, where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Space #People #Racism

If we want to do more than just end mass incarceration—if we want to put an end to the history of racial caste in America—we must lay down our racial bribes, join hands with people of all colors who are not content to wait for change to trickle down, and say to those who would stand in our way: Accept all of us or none.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Hands #Color #America

The system functioned relatively automatically, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies already seemed natural. Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were Black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Race #Color #Racism

... as recently as the mid-1970s, the most well-respected criminologists were predicting that the prison system would soon fade away. Prison did not deter crime significantly, many experts concluded. Those who had meaningful economic and social opportunities were unlikely to commit crimes regardless of the penalty, while those who went to prison were far more likely to commit crimes again in the future.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Meaningful #Opportunity #Experts

Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs
-- Michelle Alexander

#War #Color #People

Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.
-- Michelle Alexander

#Issues #Justice #Mass Incarceration

Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons.
-- Michelle Alexander

#School #Years #Cities

There are more African Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the civil war began.
-- Michelle Alexander

#War #Jail #African American