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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: 56
Born: 1967
Born: October 7
Author
Human Rights Activist
Lawyer
Professor
University Teacher
the United States of America
Men
Serve
Time
Rate
Expect
Nationwide
Behinds
Segregated
Behind
Impoverished
Higher
Rates
Community
Communities
Black
Bars

More quotes by Michelle Alexander

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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
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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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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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I say we haven't ended racial caste in America we have merely redesigned it.
Michelle Alexander
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If the drug war was waged in those communities it would spark such outrage that the war would end overnight. This literal war is waged in segregated, impoverished communities defined largely by race, and the targets are the most vulnerable, least powerful people in our society.
Michelle Alexander
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The fact that more than half of the young black men in any large American city are currently under the control of the criminal justice system (or saddled with criminal records) is not - as many argue - just a symptom of poverty or poor choices, but rather evidence of a new racial caste system at work.
Michelle Alexander
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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
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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
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No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid
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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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
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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
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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
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Many people don't realize that financial incentives have been built into the drug war that guarantee that law enforcement will continue to arrest extraordinary numbers of people, particularly in poor communities of color, for minor drug offenses that get ignored on the other side of town.
Michelle Alexander
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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
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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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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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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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Prison guard unions have become the powerful political forces in some states, particularly California.
Michelle Alexander
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The vastly different sentences afforded drunk drivers and drug offenders tells us who is viewed as disposable - someone to be purged from the body politic - and who is not. Drunk drivers are predominately white and male.
Michelle Alexander