Michelle Alexander Quotes About Crime

Quotes about: Crime

• 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

• 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

• Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns.

  Michelle Alexander

  Government, Punishment, Tools

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.7, The New Press

• ... as recently as the mid-1970s, the most well-respected criminologists were predicting that the prison system would soon fade away. Prison did not deter crime significantly, many experts concluded. Those who had meaningful economic and social opportunities were unlikely to commit crimes regardless of the penalty, while those who went to prison were far more likely to commit crimes again in the future.

  Michelle Alexander

  Meaningful, Opportunity, Experts

• Defenders of the status quo will often try to mislead the public by saying, "Just look at our state prisons: nearly half of the inmates are violent offenders. This system is about protecting the public from violent crime." This type of statement is highly misleading.

  Michelle Alexander

  Trying, Looks, Half

  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

• Our system of mass incarceration is better understood as a system of racial and social control than a system of crime prevention or control.

  Michelle Alexander

  Prevention, Crime, Social

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• For reasons that have stunningly little to do with crime or crime rates, we, as a nation, have chosen to lock up more than two million people behind bars. Millions more are on probation or parole, or branded felons for life and thus locked into a permanent second-class status.

  Michelle Alexander

  Class, Two, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• Eventually [black men] are arrested, whether they've committed any serious crime or not, and branded criminals or felons for life. Upon release, they're ushered into a parallel social universe in which the civil and human rights supposedly won during the Civil Rights Movement no longer apply to them.

  Michelle Alexander

  Men, Rights, Black

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• Most people seem to assume that this dramatic surge in imprisonment was due to a corresponding surge in crime, particularly violent crime.

  Michelle Alexander

  People, Assuming, Dramatic

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• Most criminologists today will acknowledge that crime rates and incarceration rates in the United States have had relatively little to do with each other.

  Michelle Alexander

  United States, Littles, Today

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• Incarceration rates - especially black incarceration rates - have soared regardless of whether crime has been going up or down in any given community or the nation as a whole.

  Michelle Alexander

  Community, Black, Crime

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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