Black americans Quote by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Going into any prison is deeply confusing if you know anything about the racial demographics of America. The extreme overrepresentation of people of color,…

— Bryan Stevenson

“The prisons in the United States had long been an extreme reflection of the American system itself: the stark life differences between rich and…

— Howard Zinn

One out of every eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or for…

— Randall Robinson

“The state of Mississippi eventually moved from hiring convict labor to organizing its own convict labor camp, known as Parchman Farm. It was not…

— Michelle Alexander

“It is not possible to write a relatively short book that explores all aspects of the phenomenon of mass incarceration and its implications for…

— Michelle Alexander

One of the reasons that so many people of color and poor people are in prison is that the deindustrialization of the economy has…

— Angela Davis

“Mass incarceration depends for its legitimacy on the widespread belief that all those who appear trapped at the bottom actually chose their fate…if the…

— Michelle Alexander

“When now we turn and look five miles above, there on the edge of town are five houses of prostitutes,—two of blacks and three…

— W.E.B. Du Bois

“Understanding African American attitudes and actions on matters of crime and punishment requires that we pay careful attention to another topic that is often…

— James Forman Jr

“It is a scandal—or, rather, it should be a scandal and one wonders why it isn’t—that the US prison population, after reaching a postwar…

— Michael Hardt

“[Prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”

— Angela Y. Davis

“If the movement that emerges to challenge mass incarceration fails to confront squarely the critical role of race in the basic structure of our…

— Michelle Alexander