Michelle Alexander Quotes

The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black community itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.

We've all been acculturated into accepting the inevitability of wrongful convictions, unfair sentences, racial bias, and racial disparities and discrimination against the poor.

If we continue to tell ourselves the popular myths about racial progress or, worse yet, if we say to ourselves that the problem of mass incarceration is just too big, too daunting for us to do anything about and that we should instead direct our energies to battles that might be more easily won, history will judge us harshly. A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch.

We've got to address the systemic racism in our criminal justice system.

We loathe mass incarceration. We loathe police brutality. But most of us have absolutely no idea how to address the critical flaws in our justice system.

We must put an end to the corruption and systemic racism in our justice system, and that starts by electing progressive district attorneys who will fight for real justice across the country.

There can be racism in a system even if a particular episode of injustice is not a manifestation of that racism. Every single thing in the criminal justice system is not a manifestation of racism, but many things are.

We have to deal with the way that race influences our criminal justice system.

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.

When a man hangs from a tree it doesn't spell justice unless he helped write the law that hanged him.

The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable. ... We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.

I want to see somebody go to jail over the financial crisis and not just black, brown and poor whites over humbles and minor drug beefs.

I yearn to see other chief executives throughout the nation follow suit, so that as a people we may hasten the elimination of barbarism as a tool of American justice.

The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.

We should not have drug laws or a court system that disproportionately punishes the black community.

If you want to know if racism is a problem in your country, you might not want to ask white people.

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

We spend an awful lot of money on the criminal justice system that could better be spent at the other end of the spectrum.

We have too many Black men in jail waiting for justice and too many Black women in church waiting for Jesus.

We need to rethink a system that has targeted young people, particularly young people of color, for nonviolent crimes.

I ask for calm yet resolute voices to be heard in our communities. It is imperative that people of good will, those who believe in a just and fair criminal justice system, hear our voices.

The Supreme Court has made it nearly impossible to prove race discrimination in the criminal justice system.

Mass incarceration is a massive system of racial and social control.

I think we need to rethink our ideas about what policing is and should be. I think we need to rethink our ideas about the criminal justice system as a whole, including the hysterically named corrections system. I mean, what's being corrected? Look, none of it's working.

When I travel and speak across the country, I often tell college students that we are making a significant mistake when we say to each other that this criminal justice of ours is broken. To say it's broken would be to suggest that it was well designed and had good intentions from the start.