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Michelle Alexander
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Perhaps there should be a box on the census form that says, 'I'm a criminal.' Everyone who has ever committed a crime would be required to check it. If everyone were forced to acknowledge their own criminality, maybe we, as a nation, would second-guess our apparent zeal for denying full citizenship to those branded felons.
- Michelle Alexander
#Citizenship
#Everyone
#Nation
#Own
#Zeal
Exposing police lying is difficult largely because it is rare for the police to admit their own lies or to acknowledge the lies of other officers. This reluctance derives partly from the code of silence that governs police practice and from the ways in which the system of mass incarceration is structured to reward dishonesty.
- Michelle Alexander
#Own
#Police
#Practice
#Reward
#Silence
On any given day, there's always something I'd rather be doing than facing the ugly, racist underbelly of America.
- Michelle Alexander
#Always
#America
#Day
#Doing
#Ugly
Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you've been branded a felon.
- Michelle Alexander
#Behind
#Discrimination
#Legal
#Old
#Once
Discrimination in virtually every aspect of political, economic, and social life is now perfectly legal if you've been labeled a felon.
- Michelle Alexander
#Discrimination
#Legal
#Life
#Political
Our entire political system is financed by wealthy private interests buying politicians and making sure the rules are written in their favor.
- Michelle Alexander
#Political
#Politicians
#Rules
#System
Susan Burton's life story - filled with trauma, struggle, and true heroism - is precisely the kind of story that has the potential to change the way we view our world.
- Michelle Alexander
#Change
#Life
#Struggle
#View
#World
Top-quality public education, universal health care, and free child care are among the many benefits provided by the state in Norway, reflecting its long-standing egalitarian culture and spirit of communitarianism - a spirit that extends to its prisons.
- Michelle Alexander
#Care
#Culture
#Education
#Free
#Health
As described in 'The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,' the cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.
- Michelle Alexander
#Age
#America
#Caste
#Jim Crow
#New
I don't think I understood the full extent of the trauma experienced by people who churn through America's prisons until I began taking the time to listen to their stories.
- Michelle Alexander
#America
#People
#Through
#Time
#Trauma
Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.
- Michelle Alexander
#American
#History
#Over
#Prison
#State
It doesn't matter if that felony happened three weeks ago or thirty-five years ago - for the rest of your life, you've got to check that box, knowing full well the odds are sky-high your application is going straight to the trash.
- Michelle Alexander
#Life
#Matter
#Odds
#Rest
#Three
In this country, we force millions of people - who are largely black and brown - into a permanent second-class status simply because they once committed a crime.
- Michelle Alexander
#Black
#Country
#Force
#People
#Permanent
In my view, the most important lesson we can learn from Dr. King is not what he said at the March on Washington but what he said and did after the march. In the years following the march, he did not play politics to see what crumbs a fundamentally corrupt system might toss to the beggars for justice.
- Michelle Alexander
#Important
#Justice
#King
#Politics
#View
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
#Discrimination
#Justice
#People
#Race
When people have been hurt over and over, and rather than compassion or understanding you're given lectures about how it's really all your fault and that no one needs to make amends, you can lose your mind.
- Michelle Alexander
#Compassion
#Lose
#Mind
#Understanding
Globalization and deindustrialization affected workers of all colors but hit African Americans particularly hard.
- Michelle Alexander
#Colors
#Globalization
#Hard
#Workers
I think most people have a general sense that when you're released from prison, life is hard, but, you know, if you work hard and apply self-discipline and stay out of trouble, you can make it. But that's true only for a relative few.
- Michelle Alexander
#Life Is Hard
#Life
#Prison
#True
#Work
There has been an outpouring of anger and concern because of the actions of George Zimmerman, a private citizen who profiled a young boy and pursued him and tried to confront him, perhaps. But what George Zimmerman did is no different than what police officers do every day as a matter of standard operating procedure.
- Michelle Alexander
#Anger
#Boy
#Day
#Police Officers
#Police
When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our 'colorblind' society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure - the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.
- Michelle Alexander
#Action
#Look
#Political
#Prison
#Society
All the old forms of discrimination, the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind, are now perfectly legal once you've been labeled a felon.
- Michelle Alexander
#Behind
#Discrimination
#Legal
#Now
#Old
Public housing is off-limits to you if you have been convicted of a felony. For a minimum of five years, you are deemed ineligible for public housing once you've been branded a felon. Discrimination in private housing market's perfectly legal.
- Michelle Alexander
#Discrimination
#Housing
#Legal
#Market
Felons are typically stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement, including the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. They're relegated to a permanent undercaste.
- Michelle Alexander
#Discrimination
#Education
#Free
#Legal
People have a false understanding of what our legal system is like - how it works/operates - from shows like 'Law and Order,' which suggest that lawyers appear on demand and do a tremendous amount of investigation and background research.
- Michelle Alexander
#Law
#Lawyers
#Legal
#People
#Research
People return home from prison and face legal discrimination in virtually all areas of social and economic and political life. They are legally discriminated against employment, barred from public housing, and denied other public benefits.
- Michelle Alexander
#Face
#Home
#Legal
#Life
#Political
The fact that our legal system has become so tolerant of police lying indicates how corrupted our criminal justice system has become by declarations of war, 'get tough' mantras, and a seemingly insatiable appetite for locking up and locking out the poorest and darkest among us.
- Michelle Alexander
#Justice
#Legal
#Police
#Tough
#War
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