Michelle Alexander Quotes About Justice

Quotes about: Justice

• The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black community itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.

  Michelle Alexander

  Fate, People, Justice

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.16, The New Press

• The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.

  Michelle Alexander

  Punishment, Justice, Criminals

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.188, The New Press

• The fact that more than half of the young black men in any large American city are currently under the control of the criminal justice system (or saddled with criminal records) is not - as many argue - just a symptom of poverty or poor choices, but rather evidence of a new racial caste system at work.

  Michelle Alexander

  Men, Cities, Justice

  "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness". Book by Michelle Alexander, January 5, 2010.

• My great crime wasn't refusing to represent an innocent man; my great crime was imagining that there was some path to racial justice that did not include those we view as 'guilty'.

  Michelle Alexander

  Men, Innocent Man, Views

• One in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole - yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis).

  Michelle Alexander

  Men, Rights, Jail

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• The United States does have the highest rate of incarceration in the world dwarfing the rates of even highly repressive regimes like Russia, China or Iran. This reflects a radical shift in criminal justice policy, a stunning development that virtually no one - not even the best criminologists - predicted forty years ago.

  Michelle Alexander

  Russia, Iran, Years

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don't. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color "criminals" and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.

  Michelle Alexander

  Race, Color, Practice

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• The education justice movement and the prison justice movement have been operating separately in many places as though they're in silos. But the reality is we're not going to provide meaningful education opportunities to poor kids, kids of color, until and unless we recognize that we're wasting trillions of dollars on a failed criminal justice system.

  Michelle Alexander

  Meaningful, Kids, Opportunity

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• I think it's important to encourage young people to tell their own stories and to speak openly about their own experiences with the criminal justice system and the experiences of their family. We need to ensure that the classroom environment is a supportive one so that the shame and stigma can be dispelled.

  Michelle Alexander

  Thinking, People, Justice

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• For those who say that the war on drugs and the system of mass incarceration really isn't about race, I say there is no way we would allow the majority of young white men to be swept into the criminal justice system for minor drug offenses, branded criminals and felons, and then stripped of their basis civil and human rights while young black men who are engaged in the same activity trot off to college. That would never be accepted as the norm.

  Michelle Alexander

  War, College, Men

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• We're living in a time when so many of the civil rights and social justice organizations are run by lawyers and policy people who are often very disconnected from the communities they claim to represent.

  Michelle Alexander

  Running, People, Justice

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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

  Michelle Alexander

  Issues, Justice, Mass Incarceration

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