7 Quotes by Michelle Alexander about incarceration
- Author Michelle Alexander
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Until 1988, one year of imprisonment had been the maximum for possession of any amount of any drug.
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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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As a society, our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them.
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- Author Michelle Alexander
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Historians will likely wonder how we could describe the new caste system as a system of crime control, when it is difficult to imagine a system better designed to create—rather than prevent—crime.
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- Author Michelle Alexander
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Ex-offenders are expected to pay fines and court costs, and submit paperwork to multiple agencies in an effort to win back a right that should never have been taken away in a democracy.
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- Author Michelle Alexander
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Racial violence has been rationalized, legitimated, and channeled through our criminal justice system; it is expressed as police brutality, solitary confinement, and the discriminatory and arbitrary imposition of the death penalty.
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- Author Michelle Alexander
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Whiteness mitigates crime, whereas blackness defines the criminal.
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