Michelle Alexander Quotes

I don't know, it may be that poor people are the only ones who commit crimes, but I do know that they are the only ones who serve prison sentences.

It might be that my poverty is my fault—the result of my ineptitude or my laziness. However, is there any way that the poverty that my child is condemned to is his fault? He certainly does not have the same opportunity as my child would if I were rich. But where then is our equality of opportunity?

If people are being upstanding citizens of the Republic, then you have to widen the net to incarcerate them. This explains why America's prisons are full of nonviolent offenders - a perfect example of American exceptionalism.

Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.

I've seen a lot of poverty - coming up as a young child, lost hopes and dreams and people that never had a chance to have a decent quality of life. I believe we can do a lot greater than that.

If you're low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn't seem entirely fair.

Death Row is a bridge out of that ghetto world, giving voices to those people society thinks shouldn't be heard.

Shouldn't one of the goals of prison be getting as many of the inmates as possible back out into the world to be responsible citizens? Aren't we just wasting generations of human potential by keeping over two million people behind bars?

There's a two-tier justice system. And anyone who denies it is either naive or in denial. This is what the reality of America is. If you have certain privileges, if you're from a certain socioeconomic status, you have a certain skin color, the odds are in your favor.

Denying that race matters is irrational in the face of segregation and all of the other forms of obvious racial inequity in society... Maintaining this denial of reality takes tremendous emotional and psychic energy.

I used to live in a street in Bristol which was, depending on your tabloid of choice, either Britain's most dangerous street or a moral cesspit. People made judgments about me on where I lived. It affected me - it affected my life chances. That is going on today with people in social housing. That, to me, isn't acceptable.

I come from being poor to a millionaire and I've seen the way cops treated people in my neighborhood. If you have a name, or you have a face, the treatment is different.

It's kind of almost not fair that certain people don't get the opportunities that others get just because of where they are born or where they were brought up.

There is no quick technical fix for a social problem.

For the offenders completing these short sentences whose lives are destabilised, and for society which incurs a heavy financial and social cost, prison simply isn't working.

I think our criminal justice system has two problems. We have systematic problems and we have people problems. So if the hearts of people are not about justice than any system you have won't work.

The biggest problem in America is most people believe poor people are poor because they are lazy.

I'm not supposed to be here. A lot of people from where I'm from don't make it.

The mass incarceration going on in this country and with my people is crazy.

People who face discrimination due to the color of their skin, are often obstructed by institutional barriers across our society - from education and housing, to employment and healthcare, to voting rights and the criminal justice system.

Very commonly substances are criminalized because they're associated with what's called the dangerous classes, you know, poor people, or working people.... Actually, the peak of marijuana use was as I said, in the seventies, but that was rich kids, so you don't throw them in jail. And then it got seriously criminalized, you know, you really throw people in jail for it, when it was poor people.

Because present procedures by design favor the affluent, the poor are being increasingly marginalized. And because the poor are so marginalized, they can exert little influence on institutional design decisions. We need to break out of this vicious spiral and create momentum in the opposite direction.

We send young white boys to the Army. We're sending young black boys to the prisons.

It's very hard for someone who makes $1,000 a year or some who makes less than $1 a day to care about the environment.

Privilege has its own way of seeing the world. It's not about the kind of people they are; it's about the situation they're in.