Michelle Alexander Quotes

We loathe mass incarceration. We loathe police brutality. But most of us have absolutely no idea how to address the critical flaws in our justice system.

Mass incarceration is a massive system of racial and social control.

God blessed us with all this money, so why not take the money and put it into my brother's case? Talk about social and racial injustice in our country, and mass incarceration in our country?

We have a mass incarceration among minorities that is disproportionate to our population. It's a travesty what's going on with our mass incarceration specifically of minorities.

I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.

We have too many Black men in jail waiting for justice and too many Black women in church waiting for Jesus.

We have one Black man as President; we have one million Black men in prison.

Some prison officials are determined to keep the people they lock in cages as ignorant as possible about the racial, social, and political forces that have made the United States the most punitive nation on earth. Perhaps they worry the truth might actually set the captives free.

I think we need to rethink our ideas about what policing is and should be. I think we need to rethink our ideas about the criminal justice system as a whole, including the hysterically named corrections system. I mean, what's being corrected? Look, none of it's working.

We must put an end to the corruption and systemic racism in our justice system, and that starts by electing progressive district attorneys who will fight for real justice across the country.

Mass incarceration will have to be dismantled the same way it was constructed: piecemeal, incrementally and, above all, locally.

The whole reason behind my album 'Free TC' is seeing all that police brutality, injustice, mass incarceration.

African-Americans have always viewed the protection of black lives as a civil rights issue, whether the threat comes from police officers or street criminals. Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks, African-American officials and their constituents have been consumed by it.

The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black community itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.

America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.

After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist - if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.

If I wanted to develop a scenario to destroy America, I would do what the Republicans are doing. Take the brightest and best young black men off the streets, put them in jail, make them meaner than hell for 8 or 10 years and then turn them lose in a society where there are plenty of guns for them to play with.

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds.

We should not have drug laws or a court system that disproportionately punishes the black community.

Most of today's black convicts have come to understand that they are the most abused victims of an unrighteous order.

We think it's OK for us to have the world's largest prison population and for one racial group to be overrepresented therein.

The primary contact between Black men and the government today is the prison system.

Blacks - and critically. black elites - remain skeptical of the procedural fairness of the criminal justice system, while white elites, Democrats and Republicans alike, are more willing to embrace a “law and order” approach to criminal law enforcement.

Prisons are a growth industry in a country that has stopped building schools because we would rather not pay our property taxes. And we seem remarkably comfortable with a criminal-justice system that locks up and "disappears" people we fear or hold in contempt — with prisons as closets to hide our unmentionables and as factories for processing spare human parts until there is nothing left but waste.