A Quote by Michelle Alexander

People charged with drug offenses, though, are typically poor people of color. They are routinely charged with felonies and sent to prison.

Michelle Alexander

Quote Topics

Charged Color Drug People Poor Poor People Prison Sent Though

Quote Author

Michelle Alexander
American - Writer
Born: October 7, 1967

Many people don't realize that financial incentives have been built into the drug war that guarantee that law enforcement will continue to arrest extraordinary numbers of people, particularly in poor communities of color, for minor drug offenses that get ignored on the other side of town.

Michelle Alexander

Of course in this age of colorblindness, a time when we have supposedly moved "beyond race," we as a nation would feel very uncomfortable if only black people were sent to jail for drug offenses. We seem comfortable with 90 percent of the people arrested and convicted of drug offenses in some states being African American, but if the figure was 100 percent, the veil of colorblindness would be lost.

Michelle Alexander

I've done many rallies and it's been super-charged, highly charged. People are very receptive.

Nawaz Sharif

When you're young, you don't have any experience - you're charged up, but you're out of control. And if you're old and you're not charged up, then all you have is memories. But if you're charged and stimulated by what's going on around you, and you also have experience, you know what to appreciate and what to pass by.

Neil Young

Most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime, but the enemy in this war has been racially defined. Not by accident, the drug war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown - for decades - the people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites.

Michelle Alexander

In a system where 'innocent until proven guilty' is the ultimate maxim, a person who is charged but not yet convicted of a minor crime should not be sent to prison merely because he or she lacks the financial ability to post bail.

Chris Sununu

It is as dangerous for people unaccustomed to handling words and unacquainted with their technique to tinker about with these heavily-charged nuclei of emotional power as it would be for me to burst into a laboratory and play about with a powerful electromagnet or other machine highly charged with electrical force.

Dorothy L. Sayers

In our justice system, everyone who is charged with a crime is presumed innocent unless proven guilty. It should go without saying that people who are not charged with a crime also are presumed innocent.

Rod Rosenstein

What we have to do is make sure there are prison places for those sent to prison by the courts and we will continue to do that regardless of how many people are sent to prison.

Crispin Blunt

One of the reasons that so many people of color and poor people are in prison is that the deindustrialization of the economy has led to the creation of new economies and the expansion of some old ones – I have already mentioned the drug trade and the market for sexual services. At the same time, though, there are any number of communities that more than welcome prisons as a source of employment. Communities even compete with one another to be the site where new prisons will be constructed because prisons create a significant number of relatively good jobs for their residents

Angela Davis

The prosecution makes all the important decisions: what's charged, how much is charged, whether you can get a decent offer. Every defendant becomes an informant today.

Lynne Stewart

"On what motivated Colorado voters: "Let's face it, the War on Drugs was a disaster. It may be well intentioned ... but it sent millions of kids to prison, gave them felonies often times when they had no violent crimes ... I was against this, but I can see why so many people supported it."

John Hickenlooper

All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we knew how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

In yoga, we say that everyone has a magnet on them, and you're either positively or negatively charged. So if you're liking how you're looking, you're gonna be more positively charged.

Jonathan Van Ness

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.

Michelle Alexander

Poor people, people of color - especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.

Angela Davis