Incarceration rates, especially black incarceration rates, have soared regardless of whether crime is going up or down in any given community or the nation as a whole. Michelle Alexander Read Quote
Those labeled felons may be denied the right to vote, are automatically excluded from juries, and may be legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, public benefits, much like their grandparents or great grandparents may have been discriminated against during the Jim Crow era. Michelle Alexander Read Quote
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 Read Quote
I believe that Trayvon Martin’s life might well have been spared if many of us who care about racial justice had raised our voices much, much sooner and much, much more loudly about the routine stereotyping and profiling of young black men and boys. Michelle Alexander Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Although our rules and laws are now officially colorblind, they operate to discriminate in a grossly disproportionate fashion. Michelle Alexander Read Quote
I think we’ve become blind in this country to the ways in which we’ve managed to reinvent a caste-like system here in the United States, one that functions in a manner that is as oppressive, in many respects, as the one that existed in South Africa under apartheid and that existed under Jim Crow here in the United States. Michelle Alexander Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
