Words matter. These are the best Michelle Alexander Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
It doesn’t matter if that felony happened three weeks ago or thirty-five years ago – for the rest of your life, you’ve got to check that box, knowing full well the odds are sky-high your application is going straight to the trash.
I am still committed to building a movement to end mass incarceration, but I will not do it with blinders on. If all we do is end mass incarceration, this movement will not have gone nearly far enough.
Activists take the risks, while advocates are professional tinkerers with the system. What’s necessary is for those who are advocates to support those who are activists and to envision themselves as activists.
Some might argue that it’s unfair to judge Hillary Clinton for the policies her husband championed years ago. But Hillary wasn’t picking out china while she was first lady. She bravely broke the mold and redefined that job in ways no woman ever had before.
Surely, we’ve got a way that we can tinker with this system that shuttles our children from decrepit, underfunded schools to brand-new high-tech prisons.
In the ‘era of colorblindness,’ there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we, as a nation, have ‘moved beyond’ race.
I believe that Trayvon Martin’s life might well have been spared if many of us who care about racial justice had raised our voices much, much sooner and much, much more loudly about the routine stereotyping and profiling of young black men and boys.
We have to stop thinking of criminals as ‘them’ and admit to ourselves, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’
I believe this system of mass incarceration would have Dr. King turning in his grave. There’s no doubt in my mind that Dr. King would be doing everything in his power to build a movement to end mass incarceration in the United States; a movement for education, not incarceration.
Private landlords as well as public landlords are free to discriminate against people with criminal records for the rest of their lives. You come out of prison, and where are you expected to go?
Martin Luther King Jr. could have argued that separate water fountains were too expensive, a waste of money. He would have been right about that. But cost was beside the point.
If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers, or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation.
In my view, the most important lesson we can learn from Dr. King is not what he said at the March on Washington but what he said and did after the march. In the years following the march, he did not play politics to see what crumbs a fundamentally corrupt system might toss to the beggars for justice.
We need transformational change of our criminal justice system – not just, you know, a handful of consent decrees or policy reforms.
Those labeled felons may be denied the right to vote, are automatically excluded from juries, and may be legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, public benefits, much like their grandparents or great grandparents may have been discriminated against during the Jim Crow era.
Almost no one refuses the police when confronted on the street or in a train or plane or train station. When you’re confronted by the police, very few – either the foolish or the very brave – will refuse consent when confronted by the police.
Some prison officials are determined to keep the people they lock in cages as ignorant as possible about the racial, social, and political forces that have made the United States the most punitive nation on earth. Perhaps they worry the truth might actually set the captives free.
Our nation has slashed budgets for education, job training, economic development, and drug treatment while investing billions in prisons and militarized police. A penal system unprecedented in world history has been born. Millions have been arrested and stripped of basic civil and human rights.
On any given day, there’s always something I’d rather be doing than facing the ugly, racist underbelly of America.
If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas, like Chicago, have been labeled felons for life. These men are part of a growing undercaste – not class, caste – a group of people who are permanently relegated, by law, to an inferior second-class status.
Our entire political system is financed by wealthy private interests buying politicians and making sure the rules are written in their favor.
Most new prison construction has occurred in predominately white, rural communities, and thus a new and bizarre form of segregation has emerged in recent years. Ghetto youth are transferred from their decrepit, underfunded, racially segregated schools to brand-new high-tech prisons located in white rural counties.
Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.
The clock has been turned back on racial progress in America, though scarcely anyone seems to notice. All eyes are fixed on people like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey who have defied the odds and achieved great power, wealth, and fame.
The Supreme Court has made it nearly impossible to prove race discrimination in the criminal justice system.
All the old forms of discrimination, the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind, are now perfectly legal once you’ve been labeled a felon.
People are swept into the criminal justice system – particularly in poor communities of color – at very early ages… typically for fairly minor, nonviolent crimes.
After the end of slavery, African-American men were arrested in mass, and they were arrested for extremely minor crimes like loitering, standing around, vagrancy, or the equivalent of jaywalking – arrested and then sent to prison and then leased to plantations.
The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control.
Incarceration rates, especially black incarceration rates, have soared regardless of whether crime is going up or down in any given community or the nation as a whole.
Globalization and deindustrialization affected workers of all colors but hit African Americans particularly hard.
I believe that we need to think very seriously, particularly as folks of color and progressives, about building either a new party or a new movement that can hold the Democratic Party accountable or provide a meaningful alternative.
People return home from prison and face legal discrimination in virtually all areas of social and economic and political life. They are legally discriminated against employment, barred from public housing, and denied other public benefits.
I am a criminal. Coming to terms with this aspect of my identity has helped me to see more clearly – with blinders off – the ways in which I have been encouraged not to feel any connection to ‘them,’ those labeled criminals. I see now that ‘they’ are me, and I am them.
I am inclined to believe that it would be easier to build a new party than to save the Democratic Party from itself.
Now that private prison companies have found that they can make a killing on mass incarceration, these private prison companies are now in the business of building detention centers for suspected illegal immigrants.
I no longer believe that we can ‘fix’ the police, as though the police are anything other than a mirror reflecting back to us the true nature of our democracy.
The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.
During the Jim Crow era, poll taxes and literacy tests kept the African-Americans from polls. But today, felon disenfranchisement laws accomplished what poll taxes and literacy tests ultimately could not, because those laws were struck down. But felony disenfranchisement laws had been allowed to stand.
Mandatory minimum sentences give no discretion to judges about the amount of time that the person should receive once a guilty verdict is rendered.
In this country, we force millions of people – who are largely black and brown – into a permanent second-class status simply because they once committed a crime.
In this era of mass incarceration, the police shouldn’t be trusted any more than any other witness, perhaps less so.
The extraordinary nature of individual black achievement in formerly white domain certainly does suggest that the old Jim Crow is dead, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of racial caste – if history is any guide, it may have just taken a different form.
It is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.
The U.S. Supreme Court has eviscerated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, giving the police license to sweep communities, to conduct ‘stop and frisk’ operations.
Some of our system of mass incarceration really has to be traced back to the law-and-order movement that began in the 1950s, in the 1960s.
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