Michelle Alexander
Michelle Alexander
Michelle Alexander is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, a civil rights advocate and writer. She is best known for her 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness...
jim-crow-laws age mass-incarceration
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
race order law
A new race-neutral language was developed for appealing to old racist sentiments, a language accompanied by a political movement that succeeded in putting the vast majority of backs back in their place. Proponents of racial hierarchy found they could install a new racial caste system without violating the law or the new limits of acceptable political discourse, by demanding 'law and order' rather than 'segregation forever'.
race jim-crow-laws slavery
Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.
mistake marijuana law
All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.
full hosting might practice short sky start
We'll start ramping up (today) with full practice. But we're hosting the Big Sky tournament, so we're going to be short practice time. It might put us at a disadvantage.
against bad games good might next pilot played three
I think we'd played three pretty good games in a row. Everyone's going to have a bad game, and I thought we might have one after how well we played against Pilot Rock. But at least it was now and not next week.
aggressive boards deny shoot
We have to be more aggressive on the boards and deny their penetration. We also have to shoot better than we have all season.
girls looked press worn
They made adjustments at half-time and we didn't. Their press killed us, and our girls just looked like they were worn out.
space mainstream-society racism
More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space not unlike Jim Crow, where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote.
political hierarchy kind
The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and change as they are challenged.
men views innocent-man
My 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'.
men cities justice
The fact that more than half of the young black men in any large American city are currently under the control of the criminal justice system (or saddled with criminal records) is not - as many argue - just a symptom of poverty or poor choices, but rather evidence of a new racial caste system at work.
issues justice mass-incarceration
Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.
meaningful opportunity experts
... as recently as the mid-1970s, the most well-respected criminologists were predicting that the prison system would soon fade away. Prison did not deter crime significantly, many experts concluded. Those who had meaningful economic and social opportunities were unlikely to commit crimes regardless of the penalty, while those who went to prison were far more likely to commit crimes again in the future.