Michelle Alexander Quotes About War On Drugs

Quotes about: War On Drugs

• We have now spent 1 trillion dollars waging the drug war since it began. A trillion. Those funds could have been used for education, jobs and drug treatment in the communities that needed it most. We could have used those funds for our collective well being, instead those dollars paved the way for the destruction of countless lives, families, and dreams.

  Michelle Alexander

  Dream, Jobs, War

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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

  Michelle Alexander

  Jim Crow Laws, Age, Mass Incarceration

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

• Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs

  Michelle Alexander

  War, Color, People

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

• In the 1990s - the period of the greatest escalation of the drug war - nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least, if not more, prevalent in middle class white neighborhoods and college campuses as it is in the 'hood.

  Michelle Alexander

  War, Marijuana, College

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.

  Michelle Alexander

  War, Unique, Opportunity

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.54, The New Press

• By waging the drug war and "getting tough" almost exclusively in the 'hood, we've managed to create a vast new racial undercaste in an astonishingly short period of time.

  Michelle Alexander

  War, Drug, Tough

  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.

• 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

• The wave of punitiveness that washed over the United States with the rise of the drug war and the get tough movement really flooded our schools. Schools, caught up in this maelstrom, began viewing children as criminals or suspects, rather than as young people with an enormous amount of potential struggling in their own ways and their own difficult context to make it and hopefully thrive. We began viewing the youth in schools as potential violators rather than as children needing our guidance.

  Michelle Alexander

  Children, War, Struggle

  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

• The bigger picture is that over the last 30 years, we have spent $1 trillion waging a drug war that has failed in any meaningful way to reduce drug addiction or abuse, and yet has siphoned an enormous amount of resources away from other public services, especially education.

  Michelle Alexander

  Meaningful, War, Years

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• If the drug war was waged in those communities it would spark such outrage that the war would end overnight. This literal war is waged in segregated, impoverished communities defined largely by race, and the targets are the most vulnerable, least powerful people in our society.

  Michelle Alexander

  Powerful, War, Race

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• The war on drugs has been the engine of mass incarceration. Drug convictions alone constituted about two-thirds of the increase in the federal prison population and more than half of the increase in the state prison population between 1985 and 2000, the period of our prison system's most dramatic expansion.

  Michelle Alexander

  War, Prison Population, Two

  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

• Most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime, but the enemy in this war has been racially defined. Not by accident, the drug war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown - for decades - the people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites.

  Michelle Alexander

  War, Color, Law

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• The fact that people of all colors have been ensnared by the drug war helps to preserve the system as a whole from serious critique, as it creates the impression - at a glance - that the war is being waged in an unbiased manner, even when nothing could be further from the truth.

  Michelle Alexander

  War, Color, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• 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

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