Michelle Alexander Quotes

A children's author on a soapbox is not a pleasant sight but I have become drawn into issues, slightly unwillingly, relating to young people, literacy and youth justice: just look at the number of young people we have locked up in prison, and the uselessness of it.

It's important for us to fight for certain changes that need to happen. And one of those issues that I really care about is education. But also another one is incarceration.

We must stop the trend of closing schools and building prisons.

Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons.

Increasingly, poor minority and white youth are being funneled directly from schools into prison.

In many of the high schools in the South Bronx, more children will end up in prison than will go to college.

The 'niche' effect of charter schools guarantees a swift and vicious deepening of class and racial separation.

When kids start school, families often have little choice over where they can go. Sometimes, children are forced into a failing school simply because their parents live in a certain district, and that school is the only option.

The folks who run the poverty industry in this town are worried that kids will get a better education at schools that cost half the amount they spend on the public schools. In their shoes, I'd be worried too.

Negro children are still sent to prison with adult criminals, and that they leave it half devil and half beast.

The most important domestic issue we face is education…and education is so broken.

When people lose faith in a system as they have in the public school system, they no longer want to support it.

We have to fix the education system.

There's a nastiness to conversations about U.S. education reform, which are characterized by the kind of stark taking-of-sides that's usually reserved for debates over guns or abortion rights.

Any society's insistence on how it takes democracy seriously can, in fact, be measured by the way it treats its children. And if we take that index as a measure of the United States, it's utterly failing. You have young people basically who - in schools that are increasingly modeled after prisons. You have their behavior being increasingly criminalized. And one of the most atrocious of all acts, you have the rise of debtors' prisons for children.

Public education is so important - resisting privatization and charterization, high-stakes testing, and defunding. It's important for New York, but it's also important for the country.

Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, schools are feeding our prisons.

You shouldn't have a profit motivation to fill prison cells with young Americans.

Did it ever occur to anyone that if you put nice libraries in public schools you wouldn't have to put them in prisons?

When you say you don't think we should have public schools, they can't believe you mean that. You must mean that they should be smaller. But you can't really mean no public schools.

It's time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population.

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

The White House, in advancing the agenda for a [school] "choice" plan, rests its faith on market mechanisms. What reason have the black and very poor to lend their credence to a market system that has proved so obdurate and so resistant to their pleas at every turn?

At some point - I care about charter schools and criminal justice reform and $20 trillion in debt and real growth. At some point, I want to hear that clash of ideas. I don't care if it gets ugly. That's what campaigns are all about.

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.