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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

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Michelle Alexander
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: October 7
Author
Human Rights Activist
Lawyer
Professor
University Teacher
the United States of America
Years
Inner
Prisons
Early
Tech
City
Brand
Underfunded
Cities
Ages
Tracked
High
Brands
Decrepit
Age
Criminals
Offenders
School
Schools
Labeled
Many
Prison
Teen

More quotes by Michelle Alexander

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Our system of mass incarceration is better understood as a system of racial and social control than a system of crime prevention or control.
Michelle Alexander
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Of course, no one should be trapped in bad schools or bad neighborhoods. No one. But I think we need to be asking a larger question: How do we change the norm, the larger context that people seem to accept as a given? Are we so thoroughly resigned to what is that we cannot even begin a serious conversation about how to create what ought to be?
Michelle Alexander
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Public housing projects as well as private landlords are free to deny housing to people with criminal records. In fact, you don't even have to be convicted. You can be denied housing - or your family evicted - just based on an arrest.
Michelle Alexander
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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
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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
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People charged with drug offenses, though, are typically poor people of color. They are routinely charged with felonies and sent to prison.
Michelle Alexander
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Discrimination in public benefits is also perfectly legal. Under federal law, people convicted of drug felonies are deemed ineligible even for food stamps.
Michelle Alexander
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I do believe that something akin to a racial caste system is alive and well in America.
Michelle Alexander
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The United States does have the highest rate of incarceration in the world dwarfing the rates of even highly repressive regimes like Russia, China or Iran. This reflects a radical shift in criminal justice policy, a stunning development that virtually no one - not even the best criminologists - predicted forty years ago.
Michelle Alexander
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Millions of people are unable to vote due to felony convictions with the highest rates among black men. People in prison are denied the right to vote in 48 states, and while we accept that as normal in the United States, in other western democracies people in prison do have the right to vote.
Michelle Alexander
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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
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There can be many bars, wires that keep a person trapped. All of them don't have to have been created for the purpose of harming or caging the bird, but they still serve that function.
Michelle Alexander
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Nationwide, 1 in 3 black men can expect to serve time behind bars, but the rates are far higher in segregated and impoverished black communities.
Michelle Alexander
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We're living in a time when so many of the civil rights and social justice organizations are run by lawyers and policy people who are often very disconnected from the communities they claim to represent.
Michelle Alexander
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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
Michelle Alexander
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I say we haven't ended racial caste in America we have merely redesigned it.
Michelle Alexander
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Most people seem to assume that this dramatic surge in imprisonment was due to a corresponding surge in crime, particularly violent crime.
Michelle Alexander
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Defenders of the system will counter by saying this drug war has been aimed at violent crime. But that is not the case. The overwhelming majority of people arrested in the drug war have been arrested for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses.
Michelle Alexander
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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
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One study conducted in Washington, D.C. indicated that 3 out of 4 black men, and nearly all those living in the poorest neighborhoods could expect to find themselves behind bars at some point in their life.
Michelle Alexander