Noam Chomsky Quotes

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.

Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.

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.

The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control.

Given that by age 23, almost a third of Americans are arrested for a crime, it becomes clear that in the new militarized state young people, especially poor minorities, are viewed as predators, a threat to corporate governance, and are treated as disposable populations.

Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.

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.

Mass incarceration has become normalized in the United States. Poor folks of color are shuttled from decrepit, underfunded schools to brand new, high tech prisons and then relegated to a permanent undercaste - stigmatized as undeserving of any moral care or concern.

If I had to guess and put a name on it, I'd say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism.

A massive new penal system has emerged in the past few decades - a penal system unprecedented in world history. It is a system driven almost entirely by race and class.

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

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.

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.

What every American should know is that we have more people in jail today than any other country on Earth, more than China. We have some 2.2 million people in jail. What that means is that a lot of lives are being destroyed.

The U.S. incarceration binge is not tied to crime. It's a strategy to control the surplus population in a capitalist system that is breaking down.

As a criminal you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

The system functioned relatively automatically, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies already seemed natural. 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.

Many people don't realize that financial incentives have been built into the drug war that guarantee that law enforcement will continue to arrest extraordinary numbers of people, particularly in poor communities of color, for minor drug offenses that get ignored on the other side of town.

Drugs is a government game, Bilal. A way to rob us of our best black men, our army. Everyone who plays the game loses. Then they get you right back where we started, in slavery! Then they get to say "This time you did it to yourself." I won't play that game.

Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.

The USA has more people in prison that any other country, including countries with much larger populations. 13% of the population is black but 80% of the people in prison are black, mostly for soft crimes.

The mass incarceration of poor people of color, particularly black men, has emerged as a new caste system, one specifically designed to address the social, economic, and political challenges of our time.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

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.

Look at the whole criminal correction game, which is a big piece of our economy. It's just an invention. Crime is being invented to put people to work.