Michelle Alexander Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Michelle Alexander's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Professor Michelle Alexander's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 130 quotes on this page collected since October 7, 1967! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • 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 backs back in their place. Proponents of racial hierarchy found they could install a new racial caste system without violating the law or the new limits of acceptable political discourse, by demanding 'law and order' rather than 'segregation forever'.

  • People charged with drug offenses, though, are typically poor people of color. They are routinely charged with felonies and sent to prison.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • In the war on drugs, state and state law enforcement agencies have been rewarded in cash by the federal government - through programs like the Edward Byrne Memorial Grant program - for the sheer numbers of people arrested for drug offenses.

    War  
    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • 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.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • 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.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • 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.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • We must build a movement for education, not incarceration. A movement for jobs, not jails. A movement that will end all forms of discrimination against people released from prison - discrimination that denies them basic human rights to work, shelter and food.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • 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.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • Our prison population quintupled in a thirty year period of time. Not doubled or tripled - quintupled. We went from a prison and jail population of about 300,000 to now more than 2 million.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.

    America  
    "A Bitter Harvest: California, Marijuana, and the New Jim Crow". "Bringing Down the New Jim Crow" with Chris Moore-Backman, www.prx.org. November 15, 2011.
  • Nationwide about 1 in 7 black men are temporarily or permanently disenfranchised due to felon disenfranchisement laws.

    Men  
    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • For those who say that the war on drugs and the system of mass incarceration really isn't about race, I say there is no way we would allow the majority of young white men to be swept into the criminal justice system for minor drug offenses, branded criminals and felons, and then stripped of their basis civil and human rights while young black men who are engaged in the same activity trot off to college. That would never be accepted as the norm.

    War   Men  
    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • People on probation and parole are typically denied the right to vote, and in eleven states people are denied the right to vote even after completion of their sentences.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • Kids are growing up in communities in which they see their loved ones cycling in and out of prison and in which they are sent the message in countless ways that they, too, are going to prison one way or another. We cannot build healthy, functioning schools within a context where there is no funding available because it's going to building prisons and police forces.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination - employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service - are suddenly legal.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • The mass criminalization of white men would disturb us to the core.

    Men  
    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • I was inspired by what students have done in some schools organizing walkouts protesting the lack of funding and that sort of thing. There are opportunities for students to engage in those types of protests - taking to the streets - but there is also writing poetry, writing music, beginning to express themselves, holding forums, educating each other, the whole range.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • Defenders of the status quo will often try to mislead the public by saying, "Just look at our state prisons: nearly half of the inmates are violent offenders. This system is about protecting the public from violent crime." This type of statement is highly misleading.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • Our system of mass incarceration is better understood as a system of racial and social control than a system of crime prevention or control.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • 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 (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.54, The New Press
  • 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.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • Of course in this age of colorblindness, a time when we have supposedly moved "beyond race," we as a nation would feel very uncomfortable if only black people were sent to jail for drug offenses. We seem comfortable with 90 percent of the people arrested and convicted of drug offenses in some states being African American, but if the figure was 100 percent, the veil of colorblindness would be lost.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • Most criminologists today will acknowledge that crime rates and incarceration rates in the United States have had relatively little to do with each other.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • 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.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • 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 (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.7, The New Press
  • The mythology around colorblindness leads people to imagine that if poor kids of color are failing or getting locked up in large numbers, it must be something wrong with them. It leads young kids of color to look around and say: "There must be something wrong with me, there must be something wrong with us. Is there something inherent, something different about me, about us as a people, that leads us to fail so often, that leads us to live in these miserable conditions, that leads us to go in and out of prison?"

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • My great crime wasn't refusing to represent an innocent man; my great crime was imagining that there was some path to racial justice that did not include those we view as 'guilty'.

    Men  
  • 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.

    Cycling  
    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • There is a tremendous amount of confusion and denial that exists about mass incarceration today, and that is the biggest barrier to movement building. As long as we remain in denial about this system, movement building will be impossible. Exposing youth in classrooms to the truth about this system and developing their critical capacities will, I believe, open the door to meaningful engagement and collective, inspired action.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
  • The war on drugs has been the engine of mass incarceration. Drug convictions alone constituted about two-thirds of the increase in the federal prison population and more than half of the increase in the state prison population between 1985 and 2000, the period of our prison system's most dramatic expansion.

    War  
    Source: www.truth-out.org
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 130 quotes from the Professor Michelle Alexander, starting from October 7, 1967! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!

    Michelle Alexander

    • Born: October 7, 1967
    • Occupation: Professor