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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
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Michelle Alexander
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: October 7
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Human Rights Activist
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University Teacher
the United States of America
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More quotes by Michelle Alexander
For many, whether they go to prison or not is far less about the choices they make and far more about what kind of cage they're born into.
Michelle Alexander
Prison guard unions have become the powerful political forces in some states, particularly California.
Michelle Alexander
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
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
Mass incarceration has become normalized in the United States. Poor folks of color are shuttled from decrepit, underfunded schools to brand new, high tech prisons and then relegated to a permanent undercaste - stigmatized as undeserving of any moral care or concern.
Michelle Alexander
What does this system seem designed to do? As I see it, it seems designed to send people right back to prison, which is what happens about 70% of the time.
Michelle Alexander
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
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 them.
Michelle Alexander
I think it's critically important that the people who have been most harmed by mass incarceration, by mass deportation, by neoliberalism, by all of it, not only have a voice in crafting these platforms but emerge and are supported as real leaders in these movements.
Michelle Alexander
The dramatically different manner in which we, as a nation, responded to the crisis presented by drunk driving and the crisis caused by the emergence of crack cocaine speaks volumes about who we value, and who we view as disposable.
Michelle Alexander
One in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole - yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis).
Michelle Alexander
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
Michelle Alexander
Private prison companies are now listed on the New York Stock exchange and are doing quite well in a time of economic recession (and depression in some communities). But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Michelle Alexander
The mass criminalization of white men would disturb us to the core.
Michelle Alexander
Most people seem to assume that this dramatic surge in imprisonment was due to a corresponding surge in crime, particularly violent crime.
Michelle Alexander
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
One of those lies is that all we need to do is elect more Democrats. No. That actually isn't going to get us to the Promised Land.
Michelle Alexander
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
Black men in ghetto communities (and many who live in middle class communities) are targeted by the police at early ages, often before they're old enough to vote. They're routinely stopped, frisked, and searched without reasonable suspicion or probable cause.
Michelle Alexander
Middle-class white children, children of privilege, are afforded the opportunity to make a lot of mistakes and still go on to college, still dream big dreams. But for kids who are born in the ghetto in the era of mass incarceration, the system is designed in such a way that it traps them, often for life.
Michelle Alexander
