Our criminal-justice system has for decades been infected with a mindset that views black boys and men in particular as a problem to be dealt with, managed, and controlled. A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch. All rights reserved.

Politics Hell Crisis Moral. Michelle Alexander Quotes.

I am inclined to believe that it would be easier to build a new party than to save the Democratic Party from itself. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen).

The system functioned relatively automatically, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies already seemed natural. Mass incarceration is a massive system of racial and social control. Black men with criminal records are the most severely disadvantaged group in the labor market.

On any given day, there's always something I'd rather be doing than facing the ugly, racist underbelly of America.

In 2004, there were more black men disenfranchised than in 1870 – the year the 15th Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that deny the right to vote exclusively on the basis of race.

Our criminal-justice system has for decades been infected with a mindset that views black boys and men in particular as a problem to be dealt with, managed, and controlled. In 2018, she was hired as an opinion columnist at The New York Times.Early lifeMichelle Alexander was born on October 7, 1967. 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'.

For a minimum of five years, you are deemed ineligible for public housing once you've been branded a felon.

She is the daughter of Sandra Alexander, formerly of Ashland, Oregon, and the late John Alexander, originally from Evanston, Illinois. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison. There is a system of racial and social control in communities of color across America. In major American cities today, more than half of working-age African-American men are either under correctional control or branded felons and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. Exposing police lying is difficult largely because it is rare for the police to admit their own lies or to acknowledge the lies of other officers. Mandatory minimum sentences give no discretion to judges about the amount of time that the person should receive once a guilty verdict is rendered. Thousands of people plead guilty to crimes every year in the United States because they know that the odds of a jury’s believing their word over a police officer’s are slim to none. We cannot 'fix' the police without a revolution of values and radical change to the basic structure of our society. Home > Quotes > Authors > Michelle Alexander. If you ask for jobs or economic investment, you won't get that either. City of Quotes is a platform that provides you with hundreds of thousands of famous quotes belonging to a wide and diverse range of authors, while giving you over 250 possible combinations for customization of each quote. Perhaps there should be a box on the census form that says, 'I'm a criminal.'

In 2018, she was hired as an opinion columnist at The New York Times.Early lifeMichelle Alexander was born on October 7, 1967. 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. 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. Michelle Alexander became a New York Times columnist in 2018. We cannot ‘fix’ the police without a revolution of values and radical change to the basic structure of our society. I believe the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as a very large swath of the American population, really wants to imagine that race and racial inequality is something we don't have to think about anymore, don't have to worry about anymore. Black men with criminal records are the most severely disadvantaged group in the labor market. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

View the list The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.

“ As recently as the mid-1970s, the most well-respected criminologists were predicting that the prison system would soon fade away.

There are millions of African-Americans now cycling in and out of prisons and jails or under correctional control.

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 system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control. Everyone who has ever committed a crime would be required to check it.

This reluctance derives partly from the code of silence that governs police practice and from the ways in which the system of mass incarceration is structured to reward dishonesty. Picture Quotes The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. Michelle Alexander is a writer, civil rights advocate, and visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary . 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. If there is any hope that we in America might one day overcome our own history of genocide, slavery, discrimination, and oppression and create a justice system that is truly a source of international pride rather than shame, I suspect Rwanda may have as much to teach us about what is required as any tour of a Norwegian prison. Share with your friends. 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. 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. If all we do is end mass incarceration, this movement will not have gone nearly far enough. 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'. Have some suggestions or just want to get in touch? When people have been hurt over and over, and rather than compassion or understanding you're given lectures about how it's really all your fault and that no one needs to make amends, you can lose your mind. I believe it is possible to bring an end to mass incarceration and birth a new moral consensus about how we ought to be responding to poor folks of color and a consensus in support of basic human rights for all. 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. But what we have learned, is that the one thing that poor folks of color can ask for and get are Police & Prisons.

It’s the way we respond to crime and how we view those people who have been labeled criminals. 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. They are legally discriminated against employment, barred from public housing, and denied other public benefits. More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space not unlike Jim Crow, where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on 'The Arsenio Hall Show.' Perhaps they worry the truth might actually set the captives free. Public housing is off-limits to you if you have been convicted of a felony. The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. 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. Michelle Alexander Quotes.

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. Enjoy the best Michelle Alexander Quotes Page 2 at BrainyQuote. All people make mistakes. Once labeled a felon, you are ushered into a parallel social universe. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury. That is what it means to be black. I am still committed to building a movement to end mass incarceration, but I will not do it with blinders on.

Dante Alighieri. She is best known for her 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Structure and Rhetorical Strategy in "The New Jim Crow" Rigorous Reasoning; Mandated Failures; What Alexander's "The New Jim Crow" Adds to “If Beale Street Could Talk” Most people charged with crimes forfeit their constitutional rights and plead guilty. 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. 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.

The love affair between black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time.

In this era of mass incarceration, the police shouldn't be trusted any more than any other witness, perhaps less so. Our entire political system is financed by wealthy private interests buying politicians and making sure the rules are written in their favor.

Thousands of people plead guilty to crimes every year in the United States because they know that the odds of a jury's believing their word over a police officer's are slim to none.

You're relegated to a permanent second-class status, forever a 'criminal.' People return home from prison and face legal discrimination in virtually all areas of social and economic and political life. It’s not crime that makes us more punitive in the United States. The same kinds of stereotypes and hunches that George Zimmerman used when deciding that, you know, Trayvon Martin seemed like a threat in his neighborhood, law enforcement officers employ all the time.

Share. If we want to do more than just end mass incarceration—if we want to put an end to the history of racial caste in America—we must lay down our racial bribes, join hands with people of all colors who are not content to wait for change to trickle down, and say to those who would stand in our way: Accept all of us or none. After years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself speechless. 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.

Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.

Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs. I don't think I understood the full extent of the trauma experienced by people who churn through America's prisons until I began taking the time to listen to their stories.