Quote

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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Michelle Alexander
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: October 7
Author
Human Rights Activist
Lawyer
Professor
University Teacher
the United States of America
Created
Harming
Purpose
Wires
Keep
Wire
Stills
Trapped
Still
Bars
Persons
Serve
Person
Bird
Many
Function

More quotes by 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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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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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 bigger picture is that over the last 30 years, we have spent $1 trillion waging a drug war that has failed in any meaningful way to reduce drug addiction or abuse, and yet has siphoned an enormous amount of resources away from other public services, especially education.
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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I do believe that something akin to a racial caste system is alive and well in America.
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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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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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
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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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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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The mass criminalization of white men would disturb us to the core.
Michelle Alexander
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For the rest of your life you must check the box on employment applications asking the dreaded question: Have you ever been convicted of a felony? And once you check that box, the odds are sky high that your application is going straight to the trash. Hundreds of professional licenses are off-limits to people convicted of felonies.
Michelle Alexander
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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
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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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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
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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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For children, the era of mass incarceration has meant a tremendous amount of family separation, broken homes, poverty, and a far, far greater level of hopelessness as they see so many of their loved ones cycling in and out of prison. Children who have incarcerated parents are far more likely themselves to be incarcerated.
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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Voting rights expert and legal scholar Pam Karlan reports that as of 2004, there were more black men disenfranchised than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
Michelle Alexander