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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
The mass criminalization of white men would disturb us to the core.
Mass incarceration is a massive system of racial and social control.
After years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself speechless.
We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.
Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.
The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.
I say we haven't ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.
Once you have been branded a criminal or felon, you are typically trapped for life.
There is a system of racial and social control in communities of color across America.
I do believe that something akin to a racial caste system is alive and well in America.
Black men with criminal records are the most severely disadvantaged group in the labor market.
Thousands of people go to jail, go to prison, every year without even meeting with an attorney.
Prison guard unions have become the powerful political forces in some states, particularly California.
The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control.
The Supreme Court has made it nearly impossible to prove race discrimination in the criminal justice system.
We have to stop thinking of criminals as 'them' and admit to ourselves, 'There but for the grace of God go I.'
Globalization and deindustrialization affected workers of all colors but hit African Americans particularly hard.
On any given day, there's always something I'd rather be doing than facing the ugly, racist underbelly of America.
The greatest myth about mass incarceration is that it has been driven by crime and crime rates. It's just not true.
We cannot 'fix' the police without a revolution of values and radical change to the basic structure of our society.
In this era of mass incarceration, the police shouldn't be trusted any more than any other witness, perhaps less so.
I am inclined to believe that it would be easier to build a new party than to save the Democratic Party from itself.
Nationwide about 1 in 7 black men are temporarily or permanently disenfranchised due to felon disenfranchisement laws.
Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.
Although our rules and laws are now officially colorblind, they operate to discriminate in a grossly disproportionate fashion.
Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs
One of those lies is that all we need to do is elect more Democrats. No. That actually isn't going to get us to the Promised Land.
We need transformational change of our criminal justice system - not just, you know, a handful of consent decrees or policy reforms.
In the 'era of colorblindness,' there's a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we, as a nation, have 'moved beyond' race.
Discrimination in virtually every aspect of political, economic, and social life is now perfectly legal if you've been labeled a felon.
Some of our system of mass incarceration really has to be traced back to the law-and-order movement that began in the 1950s, in the 1960s.
For many, whether they go to prison or not is far less about the choices they make and far more about what kind of cage they're born into.
Most people seem to assume that this dramatic surge in imprisonment was due to a corresponding surge in crime, particularly violent crime.
People charged with drug offenses, though, are typically poor people of color. They are routinely charged with felonies and sent to prison.
Our system of mass incarceration is better understood as a system of racial and social control than a system of crime prevention or control.
Our entire political system is financed by wealthy private interests buying politicians and making sure the rules are written in their favor.
Because standard unemployment reports continue to exclude prisoners, we have been treated to a highly misleading picture of black unemployment.
Nationwide, 1 in 3 black men can expect to serve time behind bars, but the rates are far higher in segregated and impoverished black communities.
Mandatory minimum sentences give no discretion to judges about the amount of time that the person should receive once a guilty verdict is rendered.
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.
Surely, we've got a way that we can tinker with this system that shuttles our children from decrepit, underfunded schools to brand-new high-tech prisons.
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.
Most criminologists today will acknowledge that crime rates and incarceration rates in the United States have had relatively little to do with each other.
What does this system seem designed to do? As I see it, it seems designed to send people right back to prison, which is what happens about 70% of the time.
Discrimination in public benefits is also perfectly legal. Under federal law, people convicted of drug felonies are deemed ineligible even for food stamps.
More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury. Most people charged with crimes forfeit their constitutional rights and plead guilty.
In my view, the critical questions in this era of mass incarceration are: What disturbs us? What seems contrary to expectation? Who do we really care about?
We are in a social and political context in which the norm is to punish poor folks of color rather than to educate and empower them with economic opportunity.
As described in 'The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,' the cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.