Quotes from Michelle Alexander

Almost no one refuses the police when confronted on the street or in a train or plane or train station. When you're confronted by the police, very few - either the foolish or the very brave - will refuse consent when confronted by the police.

In this country, we force millions of people - who are largely black and brown - into a permanent second-class status simply because they once committed a crime.

Once you've acquired a criminal record, you can be discriminated against legally in employment, housing, and access to education and public benefits. You're relegated to a permanent second-class status, forever a 'criminal.' Inflicting this amount of unnecessary pain and suffering is not cheap.

The U.S. Supreme Court has eviscerated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, giving the police license to sweep communities, to conduct 'stop and frisk' operations.

If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas, like Chicago, have been labeled felons for life. These men are part of a growing undercaste - not class, caste - a group of people who are permanently relegated, by law, to an inferior second-class status.

Although our rules and laws are now officially colorblind, they operate to discriminate in a grossly disproportionate fashion.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age 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.

Exposing police lying is difficult largely because it is rare for the police to admit their own lies or to acknowledge the lies of other officers. This reluctance derives partly from the code of silence that governs police practice and from the ways in which the system of mass incarceration is structured to reward dishonesty.

Mandatory minimum sentences give no discretion to judges about the amount of time that the person should receive once a guilty verdict is rendered.

I have spent years representing victims of racial profiling and police brutality and investigating patterns of drug law enforcement in poor communities of color - and attempting to help people who have been released from prison attempting to 're-enter' into a society that never seemed to have much use to them in the first place.

Our criminal-justice system has for decades been infected with a mindset that views black boys and men in particular as a problem to be dealt with, managed, and controlled.

Discrimination in virtually every aspect of political, economic, and social life is now perfectly legal if you've been labeled a felon.

People return home from prison and face legal discrimination in virtually all areas of social and economic and political life. They are legally discriminated against employment, barred from public housing, and denied other public benefits.

The success of the few does not excuse the caste-like system that exists for many. In fact, black exceptionalism - the high-profile, highly visible examples of the black success - actually serves to justify and rationalize mass incarceration.