In this country, we force millions of people - who are largely black and brown - into a permanent second-class status simply… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
Most people seem to assume that this dramatic surge in imprisonment was due to a corresponding surge in crime, particularly violent crime. — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
Most criminologists today will acknowledge that crime rates and incarceration rates in the United States have had relatively little to do with… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
People are swept into the criminal justice system - particularly in poor communities of color - at very early ages... typically for… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
People charged with drug offenses, though, are typically poor people of color. They are routinely charged with felonies and sent to prison. — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
Our system of mass incarceration is better understood as a system of racial and social control than a system of crime prevention… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
What does this system seem designed to do? As I see it, it seems designed to send people right back to prison,… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
Thousands of people go to jail, go to prison, every year without even meeting with an attorney. — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
My great crime wasn't refusing to represent an innocent man; my great crime was imagining that there was some path to racial… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
Private landlords as well as public landlords are free to discriminate against people with criminal records for the rest of their lives.… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
The great gift of 'Incarceration Nations' is that, by introducing a wide range of approaches to crime, punishment, and questions of justice… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
Incarceration rates - especially black incarceration rates - have soared regardless of whether crime has been going up or down in any… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
The war on drugs has been the engine of mass incarceration. Drug convictions alone constituted about two-thirds of the increase in the… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
What defenders of the system typically fail to acknowledge is that the reason violent offenders comprise a fairly large percentage of the… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
Once you've acquired a criminal record, you can be discriminated against legally in employment, housing, and access to education and public benefits.… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
Prosecutors frequently overcharge, load up charges on individual defendants, knowing that three strikes laws and harsh mandatory minimum sentences will force people… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
When young black men reach a certain age - whether or not there is incarceration in their families - they themselves are… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
The wave of punitiveness that washed over the United States with the rise of the drug war and the get tough movement… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
I think it's critically important for people to understand that this system of mass incarceration governs not just those who find themselves… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“The percentage of drug arrests that result in prison sentences (rather than dismissal, community service, or probation) has quadrupled, resulting in a… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
... as recently as the mid-1970s, the most well-respected criminologists were predicting that the prison system would soon fade away. Prison did… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“As law enforcement budgets exploded, so did prison and jail populations. In 1991, the Sentencing Project reported that the number of people… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“Defendants are typically denied meaningful legal representation, pressured by the threat of lengthy sentences into a plea bargain, and then placed under… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“The extraordinary increase in prison admissions due to parole and probation violations is due almost entirely to the War on Drugs. With… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“Even beyond private prison companies, a whole range of prison profiteers must be reckoned with if mass incarceration is to be undone,… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“Before we begin our tour of the drug war, it is worthwhile to get a couple of myths out of the way.… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“Criminals, it turns out, are the one social group in America we have permission to hate. In 'colorblind' America, criminals are the… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“Those who have been swept within the criminal justice system know that the way the system actually works bears little resemblance to… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“The critical point is that thousands of people are swept into the criminal justice system every year pursuant to the drug war… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“The real point here, however, is not that innocent people are locked up. That has been true since penitentiaries first opened in… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“The notion that a vast gulf exists between "criminals" and those of us who have never served time in prison is a… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature. No other country in the world imprisons so many of its… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
The greatest myth about mass incarceration is that it has been driven by crime and crime rates. It's just not true. — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“Who becomes a social pariah and excommunicated from civil society and who trots off to college bears scant relationship to the morality… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
It's not crime that makes us more punitive in the United States. It's the way we respond to crime and how we… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
Once you have been branded a criminal or felon, you are typically trapped for life. — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“Vagrancy laws and other laws defining activities such as "mischief" and "insulting gestures" as crimes were enforced vigorously against blacks. The aggressive… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
Eventually [black men] are arrested, whether they've committed any serious crime or not, and branded criminals or felons for life. Upon release,… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
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… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
The uncomfortable reality we must face is that California, like the nation as a whole, has treated generations of African Americans and Latinos as… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“Seeing race is not the problem. Refusing to care for the people we see is the problem. The fact that the meaning of race… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
Since the nations founding, African Americans repeatedly have been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die but then… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“Felon disenfranchisement laws have been more effective in eliminating black voters in the age of mass incarceration than they were under Jim Crow…These figures… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“That was King’s dream—a society that is capable of seeing each of us, as we are, with love. That is a goal worth fighting… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
Activists take the risks, while advocates are professional tinkerers with the system. What's necessary is for those who are advocates to support those who… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“Civil rights protests were frequently depicted as criminal rather than political in nature, and federal courts were accused of excessive “lenience” toward lawlessness, thereby… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
We cannot 'fix' the police without a revolution of values and radical change to the basic structure of our society. — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
If we continue to tell ourselves the popular myths about racial progress or, worse yet, if we say to ourselves that the problem of… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
The mass incarceration of poor people of color, particularly black men, has emerged as a new caste system, one specifically designed to address the… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
“[T]he slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. —W.E.B Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America… — Michelle Alexander Copy Share Image
![“Eventually [black men] are arrested, whether they've committed any serious crime or not, and branded criminals or felons for life. Upon release, they're ushered into a parallel social universe in which the civil and human rights supposedly won during the Civil Rights Movement no longer apply to…” quote by Michelle Alexander](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/b57/michelle-alexander-750_arrested_eventually-black-men-are-arrested-whethe_348081.jpg)
![“[T]he slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. —W.E.B Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America For” quote by Michelle Alexander](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/fdb/michelle-alexander-750_slavery_t-he-slave-went-free-stood-a-brief-momen_96485.jpg)