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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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Michelle Alexander
Age: 56
Born: 1967
Born: October 7
Author
Human Rights Activist
Lawyer
Professor
University Teacher
the United States of America
Nations
Soared
Community
Incarceration
Whether
Rates
Black
Regardless
Given
Rate
Whole
Crime
Going
Especially
Nation

More quotes by Michelle Alexander

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What defenders of the system typically fail to acknowledge is that the reason violent offenders comprise a fairly large percentage of the state prison population is because they typically receive longer sentences than non-violent offenders.
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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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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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
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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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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 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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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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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
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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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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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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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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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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 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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In the 1990s - the period of the greatest escalation of the drug war - nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least, if not more, prevalent in middle class white neighborhoods and college campuses as it is in the 'hood.
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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The mass criminalization of white men would disturb us to the core.
Michelle Alexander
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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
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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