Michelle Alexander Quotes

I went down to the prison in Menard, thinking we were the vanguard, but down there, I got down on my knees and listened and learned from the people.

I came out even with all the struggles I endured on Rikers Island.

We think it's OK for us to have the world's largest prison population and for one racial group to be overrepresented therein.

The primary contact between Black men and the government today is the prison system.

Years now, decades, of visiting my parents behind bars taught me hard lessons about how broken the criminal justice system is - about how devoid of compassion it is. It's not healing the harm that victims experience. It's not rehabilitating people. And in many ways, it's making us less safe.

I lost years of my life to prison because of two-dimensional and misogynist stereotypes.

One of the things I love about 'Orange' is I think we bring to light a lot of topics that, particularly in terms of prison, might go untalked about.

'Firelight' is a beautiful story about a lot of young women. My character, Caroline, is a girl who has a bad boyfriend, and he ends up getting her locked up and incarcerated.

After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist - if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.

I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.

Books can capture injustices in a way that stays with you and makes you want to do something about them. That's why they are so powerful.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes…. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.

The prison system of the United States is an unendurable disgrace to a civilized country.

We might think of prisons as miniature socialist societies, where government is in full control. For that reason, they are a complete failure for everyone but those who get the contracts to build the jails and those who work in them.… In prison, nothing takes place outside the government's purview. The people therein are wholly and completely controlled by state managers, which means that they have no value. And yet it is a place of monstrous chaos, abuse, and corruption. Is it any wonder that people coming out of prison are no better off than before they went in, and are often worse, and scarred for life?

It's a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there.

One of the things that pains me is we have so tragically underestimated the trauma, the hardship we create in this country when we treat people unfairly, when we incarcerate them unfairly, when we condemn them unfairly.

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.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery other than in prisons - but it was a lie that you regained your freedom once you left the prison gates.

The day-to-day discomforts of prison life, combined with the big-picture realities of mass incarceration, do not add up to a party.

While mass incarceration is a national crisis, it was built locally.

When we have people whose lives are being turned around in a negative way because they're incarcerated for either too long or for crimes that don't need incarceration, that's a moral issue for me.

Prison killed me. It destroyed me.

My perception has changed from thinking if someone's in jail they're supposed to be, to there's a lot of factors that's not that simple.

America should be ashamed to say they have the best justice system in the world when, every day, race plays a part in who goes to prison, who don't go to prison.

The fact that more than 50 percent of Americans have an immediate family member either currently or formerly incarcerated tells you a lot about just how defining a feature of American culture incarceration has become.