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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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Michelle Alexander
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: October 7
Author
Human Rights Activist
Lawyer
Professor
University Teacher
the United States of America
Behinds
Segregated
Behind
Impoverished
Higher
Rates
Community
Communities
Black
Bars
Men
Serve
Time
Rate
Expect
Nationwide
More quotes by Michelle Alexander
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
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
I say we haven't ended racial caste in America we have merely redesigned it.
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
I do believe that something akin to a racial caste system is alive and well in America.
Michelle Alexander
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
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
Incarceration rates - especially black incarceration rates - have soared regardless of whether crime has been going up or down in any given community or the nation as a whole.
Michelle Alexander
We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.
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
Of course it would make far more sense to invest in education and job creation in poor communities of color, rather than spend billions of dollars caging them and monitoring them upon release.
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
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
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
In fact, in some countries there are actually voting drives conducted in prison! But here in the U.S., we seem to take the idea of democracy a bit less seriously and people are denied the right to vote not only when they are in prison, but also upon release in many states.
Michelle Alexander
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
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
The fact that people of all colors have been ensnared by the drug war helps to preserve the system as a whole from serious critique, as it creates the impression - at a glance - that the war is being waged in an unbiased manner, even when nothing could be further from the truth.
Michelle Alexander
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
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
