Top 89 Michelle Alexander Quotes
#1. 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
#3. 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
#4. A report in 2000 observed that among youth who have never been sent to a juvenile prison before, African Americans were more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes.
Michelle Alexander
#5. People of color are actually no more likely to be guilty of drug crimes and many other offenses than whites.
Michelle Alexander
#6. If you ask for good schools, you aren't likely to get them. If you ask for jobs or economic investment, you won't get that either. But what we have learned, is that the one thing that poor folks of color can ask for and get are Police & Prisons.
Michelle Alexander
#7. No other country in the world disenfranchises people who are released from prison in a manner even remotely resembling the United States. In fact, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has charged that U.S. disenfranchisement policies are discriminatory and violate international law.
Michelle Alexander
#8. The criminalization and demonization of black men has turned the black community against itself, unraveling community and family relationships, decimating networks of mutual support, and intensifying the shame and self-hate experienced by the current pariah caste.
Michelle Alexander
#9. This book argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system.
Michelle Alexander
#10. 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
#11. Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system. The
Michelle Alexander
#12. The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and change as they are challenged.
Michelle Alexander
#13. Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.
Michelle Alexander
#14. 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
#15. In the words of then - vice president Richard Nixon, the increasing crime rate "can be traced directly to the spread of the corrosive doctrine that every citizen possesses an inherent right to decide for himself which laws to obey and when to disobey them."37
Michelle Alexander
#16. Under the new law, drug busts motivated by the desire to seize cash, cars, homes, and other property are still perfectly legal.
Michelle Alexander
#17. Among other harsh penalties, the legislation included mandatory minimum sentences for the distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for distribution of crack - associated with blacks - than powder cocaine, associated with whites.
Michelle Alexander
#18. State and local law enforcement agencies were granted the authority to keep, for their own use, the vast majority of cash and assets they seize when waging the drug war.
Michelle Alexander
#19. 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
#20. Young African American men were the only group to experience a steep increases in joblessness between 1980 and 2000, a development directly traceable to the increase in the penal population. During
Michelle Alexander
#21. Meanwhile, the separation of the races had begun to emerge as a comprehensive pattern throughout the South, driven in large part by the rhetoric of the planter elite, who hoped to reestablish a system of control that would ensure a low-paid, submissive labor force.
Michelle Alexander
#23. This research suggests that banning the box is not enough. We must also get rid of the mind-set that puts black men "in the box." This is no small challenge.
Michelle Alexander
#24. These stark racial disparities cannot be explained by rates of drug crime. Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.
Michelle Alexander
#25. For example, advocates are frequently asked, When will we (finally) become a colorblind society? The pursuit of colorblindness makes people impatient. With courage, we should respond: Hopefully never. Or if those words are too difficult to utter, then say: "Not in the foreseeable future.
Michelle Alexander
#26. Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs
Michelle Alexander
#27. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In
Michelle Alexander
#28. Today's lynching is a felony charge. Today's lynching is incarceration. Today's lynch mobs are professionals. They have a badge; they have a law degree. A felony is a modern way of saying, 'I'm going to hang you up and burn you.' Once you get that F, you're on fire.
Michelle Alexander
#29. As professor Sheri Lynn Johnson once remarked, "If prosecutors exist who . . . cannot create a 'racially neutral' reason for discriminating on the basis of race, bar exams are too easy."80
Michelle Alexander
#30. Douglas Blackmon, in Slavery by Another Name, describes how tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested during this period, many of them hit with court costs and fines, which had to be worked off in order to secure their release.
Michelle Alexander
#31. African Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs than whites, but they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for precisely the same conduct.
Michelle Alexander
#32. African Americans constituted only 15 percent of current drug users in 1995, and they constitute roughly the same percentage today.
Michelle Alexander
#33. Mass incarceration - not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement - is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement
Michelle Alexander
#34. We should hope not for a colorblind society but instead for a world in which we can see each other fully, learn from each other, and do what we can to respond to each other with love.
Michelle Alexander
#35. The Court long ago acknowledged that effective use of consent searches by the police depends on the ignorance (and powerlessness) of those who are targeted. In
Michelle Alexander
#36. Racial caste systems do not require racial hostility or overt bigotry to thrive. They need only racial indifference, as Martin Luther King Jr. warned more than forty-five years ago.
Michelle Alexander
#37. Approximately 80 percent of criminal defendants are indigent and thus unable to hire a lawyer.64 Yet our nation's public defender system is woefully inadequate.
Michelle Alexander
#38. Drug-war forfeiture laws are frequently used to allow those with assets to buy their freedom, while drug users and small-time dealers with few assets to trade are subjected to lengthy prison terms.
Michelle Alexander
#39. In 1985, in Batson v. Kentucky, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits prosecutors from discriminating on the basis of race when selecting juries, a ruling hailed as an important safeguard against all-white juries locking up African Americans based on racial biases and stereotypes.
Michelle Alexander
#40. Suddenly, police departments were capable of increasing the size of their budgets, quite substantially, simply by taking the cash, cars, and homes of people suspected of drug use or sales.
Michelle Alexander
#41. Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.
Michelle Alexander
#42. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. I
Michelle Alexander
#43. Although whites were more likely to be guilty of carrying drugs, they were far less likely to be viewed as suspicious, resulting in relatively few stops, searches, and arrests of whites. The
Michelle Alexander
#45. This feat has been achieved largely by appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower-class whites, a group of people who are understandably eager to ensure that they never find themselves trapped at the bottom of the American totem pole.
Michelle Alexander
#46. Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born.
Michelle Alexander
#47. Every system of control depends for its survival on the tangible and intangible benefits that are provided to those who are responsible for the system's maintenance and administration.
Michelle Alexander
#48. In any war, a tremendous amount of collateral damage is inevitable. Black and brown people are the principal targets in this war; white people are collateral damage.
Michelle Alexander
#49. are we willing to demonize a population, declare a war against them, and then stand back and heap shame and contempt upon them for failing to behave like model citizens while under attack?
Michelle Alexander
#50. The purpose of the book is to break the silence and stigma surrounding sexual abuse and to educate the public on how they can be greater advocates for victims. As a people, a nation and a society, we all have a part to play in curbing this issue.
Michelle Alexander
#51. Federal drug forfeiture laws are one reason, Blumenson and Nilsen note, why state and federal prisons now confine large numbers of men and women who had relatively minor roles in drug distribution networks, but few of their bosses.
Michelle Alexander
#52. Mistaken belief that racial animus is necessary for the creation and maintenance of racialized systems of social control is the most important reason that we, as a nation, have remained in deep denial.
Michelle Alexander
#53. The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had abolished slavery but allowed one major exception: slavery remained appropriate as punishment for a crime. In
Michelle Alexander
#54. I am writing this book for people like me -- the person I was ten years ago.
Michelle Alexander
#55. Major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.
Michelle Alexander
#56. As a society, our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them.
Michelle Alexander
#57. A new race-neutral language was developed for appealing to old racist sentiments, a language accompanied by a political movement that succeeded in putting the vast majority of blacks back in their place.
Michelle Alexander
#58. In an effort to address the rampant joblessness among black men labeled criminals, a growing number of advocates in recent years have launched Ban the Box campaigns.
Michelle Alexander
#59. The law and order perspective, first introduced during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement by rabid segregationists, had become nearly hegemonic two decades later. By
Michelle Alexander
#60. Research conducted by the Corporation for Supportive Housing in New York State shows that the use of state prisons and city jails dropped by 74 percent and 40 percent respectively when people with past criminal records were provided with supportive housing.
Michelle Alexander
#61. The public symbols and constant reminders of black subjugation were supported by whites across the political spectrum, though the plight of poor whites remained largely unchanged. For them, the racial bribe was primarily psychological.
Michelle Alexander
#62. The prevailing caste system cannot be successfully dismantled with a purely race-neutral approach. To
Michelle Alexander
#63. Unless the number of people who are labeled felons is dramatically reduced, and unless the laws and policies that keep ex-offenders marginalized from the mainstream society and economy are eliminated, the system will continue to create and maintain an enormous undercaste.
Michelle Alexander
#64. The number of annual drug arrests more than tripled between 1980 and 2005, as drug sweeps and suspicionless stops and searches proceeded in record numbers.
Michelle Alexander
#65. In Chicago (as in other cities across the United States), young black men are more likely to go to prison than to college.
Michelle Alexander
#66. Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons.
Michelle Alexander
#67. Men are so constituted that they derive their conviction of their own possibilities largely from the estimate formed of them by others. If nothing is expected of a people, that people will find it difficult to contradict that expectation.
Michelle Alexander
#68. Have we unwittingly exaggerated the importance of individuals succeeding within pre-existing structures of power, and thereby undermined King's call for a "complete restructuring" of our society? Have
Michelle Alexander
#69. Most of these stops and searches are futile. It has been estimated that 95 percent of Pipeline stops yield no illegal drugs.
Michelle Alexander
#70. In Virginia, for example, fees paid to court-appointed attorneys for representing someone charged with a felony that carries a sentence of less than twenty years are capped at $428.
Michelle Alexander
#71. 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
#72. Martin Luther King Jr. called for us to be lovestruck with each other, not colorblind toward each other. To be lovestruck is to care, to have deep compassion, and to be concerned for each and every individual, including the poor and vulnerable.
Michelle Alexander
#73. Devastation wrought by crack cocaine and the drug war, and the odd coincidence that an illegal drug crisis suddenly appeared in the black community after - not before - a drug war had been declared. In fact, the War on Drugs began at a time when illegal drug use was on the decline.
Michelle Alexander
#74. Perhaps most heroic are those who, upon release, launch social justice organizations that challenge the discrimination ex-offenders face and provide desperately needed support for those newly released from prison.
Michelle Alexander
#75. So herein lies the paradox and predicament of young black men labeled criminals. A war has been declared on them, and they have been rounded up for engaging in precisely the same crimes that go largely ignored in middle-and upper-class white communities - possession
Michelle Alexander
#76. Viewed as a whole, the relevant research by cognitive and social psychologists to date suggests that racial bias in the drug war was inevitable, once a public consensus was constructed by political and media elites that drug crime is black and brown.
Michelle Alexander
#77. Challenging mass incarceration requires something civil rights advocates have long been reluctant to do: advocacy on behalf of criminals. Even
Michelle Alexander
#78. The majority of black women are unmarried today, including 70 percent of professional black women.
Michelle Alexander
#79. Any racial justice movement, to be successful, must vigorously challenge the public consensus that underlies the prevailing system of control. Nooses,
Michelle Alexander
#80. 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
#81. It is impossible to know for certain how many innocent drug defendants convict themselves every year by accepting a plea bargain out of fear of mandatory sentences,
Michelle Alexander
#82. Most people assume the War on Drugs was launched in response to the crisis caused by crack cocaine in inner-city neighborhoods.
Michelle Alexander
#83. This system of control depends far more on racial indifference (defined as a lack of compassion and caring about race and racial groups) than racial hostility - a feature it actually shares with its predecessors. All
Michelle Alexander
#84. Through a web of laws, regulations, and informal rules, all of which are powerfully reinforced by social stigma, they are confined to the margins of mainstream society and denied access to the mainstream economy.
Michelle Alexander
#85. Mandatory sentencing laws are frequently justified as necessary to keep "violent criminals" off the streets, yet these penalties are imposed most often against drug offenders and those who are guilty of nonviolent crimes.
Michelle Alexander
#86. Downright ridiculous legislation (such as laws specifically prohibiting blacks and whites from playing chess together).
Michelle Alexander
#87. 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
#88. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran.
Michelle Alexander
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