Michelle Alexander Quotes About Offense

Quotes about: Offense

• All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.

  Michelle Alexander

  Mistake, Marijuana, Law

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.215, The New Press

• People charged with drug offenses, though, are typically poor people of color. They are routinely charged with felonies and sent to prison.

  Michelle Alexander

  Color, People, Drug

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• 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.

  Michelle Alexander

  Race, Color, Racism

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.58, The New Press

• In response to the advocacy of groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, most states adopted tougher laws to punish drunk driving. Numerous states now have some type of mandatory sentencing for this offense - typically two days in jail for a first offense and two to ten days for a second offense. Possession of a tiny amount of crack cocaine, on the other hand, was given a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison.

  Michelle Alexander

  Mother, Jail, Hands

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• Mandatory minimum sentences give no discretion to judges about the amount of time that the person should receive once a guilty verdict is rendered. Harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses were passed by Congress in the 1980s as part of the war on drugs and the "get tough" movement, sentences that have helped to fuel our nation's prison boom and have also greatly aggravated racial disparities, particularly in the application of mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine.

  Michelle Alexander

  War, Giving, Judging

  "Michelle Alexander: “Zimmerman Mindset” Endangers Young Black Lives with Poverty, Prison & Murder". "Democracy Now!" with Amy Goodman, www.democracynow.org. July 17, 2013.

• Defenders of the system will counter by saying this drug war has been aimed at violent crime. But that is not the case. The overwhelming majority of people arrested in the drug war have been arrested for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses.

  Michelle Alexander

  War, People, Drug

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• 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.

  Michelle Alexander

  War, Numbers, Color

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• In the war on drugs, state and state law enforcement agencies have been rewarded in cash by the federal government - through programs like the Edward Byrne Memorial Grant program - for the sheer numbers of people arrested for drug offenses.

  Michelle Alexander

  War, Numbers, Agency

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep, for their own use, up to 80 percent of the cash, cars, and homes seized from suspected drug offenders. You don't even have to be convicted of a drug offense; if you're just suspected of a drug offense, law enforcement has the right to keep the cash they find on you or in your home, or seize your car if drugs are allegedly found in it or "suspected" of being transported in the vehicle.

  Michelle Alexander

  Home, Agency, Law

  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

• Of course in this age of colorblindness, a time when we have supposedly moved "beyond race," we as a nation would feel very uncomfortable if only black people were sent to jail for drug offenses. We seem comfortable with 90 percent of the people arrested and convicted of drug offenses in some states being African American, but if the figure was 100 percent, the veil of colorblindness would be lost.

  Michelle Alexander

  Jail, Race, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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