For the rest of their lives, [black men] can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits. So 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 AlexanderOur system of mass incarceration is better understood as a system of racial and social control than a system of crime prevention or control.
Michelle AlexanderPlenty of drug dealing does happen in the 'hood, but it happens everywhere else in America as well. In fact, some studies suggest that where significant differences in the data can be found, white youth are more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth.
Michelle AlexanderMy 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 AlexanderThe 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 AlexanderWe would never throw up our hands and say to those white boys - well, too bad, if you had just stayed away from marijuana or not dealt dope to your friends when you were 18 you wouldn't be serving a life sentence in prison right now. You wouldn't be locked out of jobs, unable to even get work at McDonalds. No, instead we'd say, "What's wrong with us as a nation that we would condemn so many of our young men to a life of poverty, exclusion, and scorn simply because they made a few mistakes in their youth?".
Michelle Alexander