Michelle Alexander Quotes

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

When I worked as a prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia in the 1990s, that city, like so much of America, was experiencing horrific levels of violent crime. But to describe it that way obscures an important truth: for the most part, white people weren't dying; black people were dying. Most white people could drive around the problem.

Prisons are like the concentration camps of our time. So many go in and never come out, and primarily they're black and Latino.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

When you allow racial disparity and institutional inequity to affect one part of the country, eventually it's coming back to get everyone.

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 white man believes in equality, but apparently believes the white man is more equal than the Indian.

Racialized oppression and dehumanization is woven into the very fabric of our nation — the effects of which can be seen in the lawful lynching of black and brown people by the police, and the mass incarceration of black and brown lives in the prison industrial complex,

Some prison officials are determined to keep the people they lock in cages as ignorant as possible about the racial, social, and political forces that have made the United States the most punitive nation on earth. Perhaps they worry the truth might actually set the captives free.

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.

The success of the few does not excuse the caste-like system that exists for many. In fact, black exceptionalism - the high-profile, highly visible examples of the black success - actually serves to justify and rationalize mass incarceration.

We now have the Black Lives Matter movement. I find that curious because this country is not quite the melting pot it's purported to be. Black lives are unknown in some pla'ces.

I think that the over-incarceration of black and brown folk is one of the great crimes of American society.

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

America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.

It's almost like a lot of black people in America, a lot of young black men, are born with this cloud over their heads. It's their penitentiary cloud, this philosophy we all have, that it's harder for us.

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.

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

There are poor people of color in this country whose bodies, locked in cages, enrich the prison-industrial complex.

We incarcerate more African-American men today than were slaves in 1850.

Institutionalized racism is an imaginary enemy.

We're all burdened by our history of racial inequality. It's created a kind of smog that we all breathe in, and it has prevented us from being healthy.

The prison-industrial complex, poverty, and the school system has more effect on a young black male in America than Jay-Z does, by far. And that's not a diss to Jay-Z. The crime rate in the black community was high before hip hop. Rapping about it is just a reflection of the life a lot of people are living.

If there is inequality, and that equates with colour, then I'm going to deal with it.