374 Quotes by Michelle Alexander
- Author Michelle Alexander
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The war has become institutionalized. It is no longer a special program or politicized project; it is simply the way things are done.
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- Author Michelle Alexander
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Few would guess that our prison population leaped from approximately 350,000 to 2.3 million in such a short period of time due to changes in laws and policies, not changes in crime rates. Yet it has been changes in our laws—particularly the dramatic increases in the length of our prison sentences—that have been responsible for the growth of our prison system, not increases in crime.
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- Author Michelle Alexander
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There are many things that are difficult to manage during this period of our nation's history; avoiding terms that reduce people to prison labels i not one of them.
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- Author Michelle Alexander
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[W]e've learned how to send people into outer space and how to shrink a powerful computer into a device that fits into the palm of our hand, yet we haven't yet learned how to face our racial history or how to tell the truth about the devastation wrought by colonialism, militarism, and global capitalism. We've learned how to develop powerful surveillance systems and how to build missiles that can reach halfway around the globe. But what have we learned about the true meaning of justice?
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- Author Michelle Alexander
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One study suggests that the standard crime news "script" is so prevalent and so thoroughly racialized that viewers imagine a black perpetrator even when none exists. In that study, 60 percent of viewers who saw a story with no image falsely recalled seeing one, and 70 percent of those viewers believed the perpetrator to be African American.
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- Author Michelle Alexander
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The McCleskey decision was not really about the death penalty at all; rather, the Court's opinion was driven by a desire to immunize the entire criminal justice system from claims of racial bias...Racial discrimination, the Court seemed to suggest, was something that simply must be tolerated in the criminal justice system, provided no one admits to racial bias.
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- Author Michelle Alexander
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The rhetoric of "law and order" was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement.
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- Author Michelle Alexander
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Eliminating 'savages' is less of a moral problem than eliminating human beings, and therefore American Indians came to be understood as a lesser race—uncivilized savages—thus providing a justification for the extermination of the native peoples.
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- Author Michelle Alexander
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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.
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