Michelle Alexander Quotes

In some cities such as Washington, DC, that 75 percent of young black men can expect to serve time in prison.

The Bureau of Justice reports that one in three black male babies born this century will go to jail or prison - that is an absolutely astonishing statistic. And it ought to be terrorizing to not just to people of color, but to all of us.

We recriminalized black life. Incarceration rates since the 1908s have gone through the roof, overwhelmingly black males, women and Hispanics to some extent. Essentially re-doing what happened under Reconstruction. That's the history of African Americans - so how can any one say there's no problem. Sure, racism is serious, but it's worse than that.

By waging the drug war and "getting tough" almost exclusively in the 'hood, we've managed to create a vast new racial undercaste in an astonishingly short period of time.

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.

Today 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. There are millions of African-Americans now cycling in and out of prisons and jails or under correctional control or saddled with criminal records. In major American cities today, more than half of working-age African-American men either are under correctional control or are branded felons, and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.

Nationwide, 1 in 3 black men can expect to serve time behind bars, but the rates are far higher in segregated and impoverished black communities.

In many large urban areas, the majority of working age African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. It is viewed as "normal" in ghetto communities to go to prison or jail.

If I wanted to develop a scenario to destroy America, I would do what the Republicans are doing. Take the brightest and best young black men off the streets, put them in jail, make them meaner than hell for 8 or 10 years and then turn them lose in a society where there are plenty of guns for them to play with.

One third of African American males are destined to be in prison sometime in their lifetime.

The United States makes up 5 percent of the world’s population yet has 25% of its prison population.

America, the self-described greatest nation on Earth, has the highest incarceration rate on the planet.

No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid

Like Ice Cube asks, "Why are more niggers in the pen than in college?" It's easier to go to the pen than it is to go to college.

One out of 100 citizens of the U.S. is going to prison, and it's not that the system is making criminals, it's that it's making criminals better criminals. We're breeding them like rats and it has to change.

We have 2.2 million people in prison. It’s a national disgrace.

Today, 15 years after crime peaked, the American prison system has become a leviathan unmatched in human history. Never has a supposedly ‘free country’ denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens…. We have become a nation of jailers.

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

We have one Black man as President; we have one million Black men in prison.

Prisons are a growth industry in a country that has stopped building schools because we would rather not pay our property taxes. And we seem remarkably comfortable with a criminal-justice system that locks up and "disappears" people we fear or hold in contempt — with prisons as closets to hide our unmentionables and as factories for processing spare human parts until there is nothing left but waste.

Everybody in Detroit knows somebody who is in prison…. In Detroit, most of us are one incident from being locked up.

We here in America make up 5 percent of the world’s population, but we make up 25 percent of jailed prisoners. We have now over 3000 … Federal crimes.

The fact that the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world's population incarcerates 25% of the world's prisoners is largly due to manditory minimum sentences.

The media love to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up about 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.