Michelle Alexander Quotes

I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

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.

Prison opened my eyes to so many things. It was a great time. I met interesting people. I got to understand the behaviour of the police and the media. I am an observer of the human race.

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.

The United States imprisons many non-violent offenders who could instead be required to pay fines, perform community service, and make restitution to their victims… Maintaining our vast network of prisons consumes resources that could be better spent on education and other crime prevention efforts... Rather than reforming offenders, prison too often degrades and dehumanizes prisoners, making the task of rehabilitation and reentry into society even more difficult.

The very rights that we supposedly won for African Americans in the civil rights movement no longer exist for those labeled felons. That's why I say we have not ended racial caste in America; we've merely redesigned it.

In this country, we force millions of people - who are largely black and brown - into a permanent second-class status simply because they once committed a crime.

Discrimination in virtually every aspect of political, economic, and social life is now perfectly legal if you've been labeled a felon.

We're the only ethnic group that says, 'Hey, if you go to jail, it gives you street cred.'

Everyone needs a place to live. Everyone needs a place to come home to every night. I don't understand why our society, our government, can think that you can lock a person away for months or years... and then release them back after they pay their debt without any support and expect it to be okay.

Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.

It's dangerous to write people off just because they've been arrested.

I am a firm believer that upon release, ex-offenders should be afforded a second chance to become productive citizens by providing rehabilitation and education that will help them join the workforce.

A far greater factor than abolishing poverty is the deterrent effect of swift and certain consequences: swift arrest, prompt trial, certain penalty and - at some point - finality of judgment.

Society during the last hundred years has been alternately perplexed and encouraged respecting the two great questions: how shall the criminal and pauper be disposed of in order to reduce crime and reform the criminal on the one hand and, on the other, to diminish pauperism and restore the pauper to useful citizenship?

I've definitely become more aware of the penal system and more aware of what life could be like inside a prison.

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

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.

Blacks - and critically. black elites - remain skeptical of the procedural fairness of the criminal justice system, while white elites, Democrats and Republicans alike, are more willing to embrace a “law and order” approach to criminal law enforcement.

A reform in the system of criminal jurisprudence, by which the death penalty shall no longer be inflicted; and by which, during that term, a portion of the prison employment shall be for, and the product thereof be faithfully paid over to, the support of the criminal’s family; and by which our so-called prisons shall be virtually transformed into vast reformatory workshops, from which the unfortunate may emerge to be useful members of society, instead of the alienated citizens they now are.

If we have to build more prisons, it means we have failed.

The jails and prisons are the new insane asylums. That’s what we are.

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.

It's not crime that makes us more punitive in the United States. It's the way we respond to crime and how we view those people who have been labeled criminals.

Almost one in three Americans has had some contact with the criminal justice system. When you reach that saturation point, people begin to understand, in a very visceral way, the difficulties of reentry.