American - Writer | October 7, 1967 -
Mandatory minimum sentences give no discretion to judges about the amount of time that the person should receive once a guilty verdict is rendered.
Michelle Alexander
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Although our rules and laws are now officially colorblind, they operate to discriminate in a grossly disproportionate fashion.
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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.
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The very rights that we supposedly won for African Americans in the civil rights movement no longer exist for those labeled felons. That's why I say we have not ended racial caste in America; we've merely redesigned it.
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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.
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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.
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The sprinkling of people of color through elite institutions in the United States, due to affirmative action policies and the limited progress of middle-class and upper-middle-class African Americans, creates the illusion of great progress.
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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.
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People are swept into the criminal justice system - particularly in poor communities of color - at very early ages... typically for fairly minor, nonviolent crimes.
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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.
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Because standard unemployment reports continue to exclude prisoners, we have been treated to a highly misleading picture of black unemployment.
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In a sense, mass incarceration has emerged as a far more extreme form of physical and residential segregation than Jim Crow segregation. Rather than merely shunting people of color to the other side of town, people are locked in literal cages - en masse.
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