Michelle Alexander

The fact that our legal system has become so tolerant of police lying indicates how corrupted our criminal justice system has become by declarations of war, 'get tough' mantras, and a seemingly insatiable appetite for locking up and locking out the poorest and darkest among us.

I don't think I understood the full extent of the trauma experienced by people who churn through America's prisons until I began taking the time to listen to their stories.

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.

Prisoners do matter when analyzing the severity of racial inequality in the U.S. Yet because they are out of sight and out of mind, it is easy to imagine that we are making far more racial progress than we actually are.

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

I believe the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as a very large swath of the American population, really wants to imagine that race and racial inequality is something we don't have to think about anymore, don't have to worry about anymore.

The greatest myth about mass incarceration is that it has been driven by crime and crime rates. It's just not true.

We have to stop thinking of criminals as 'them' and admit to ourselves, 'There but for the grace of God go I.'

The same kinds of stereotypes and hunches that George Zimmerman used when deciding that, you know, Trayvon Martin seemed like a threat in his neighborhood, law enforcement officers employ all the time.

Once labeled a felon, you are ushered into a parallel social universe. You can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits - forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind.

Our nation has slashed budgets for education, job training, economic development, and drug treatment while investing billions in prisons and militarized police. A penal system unprecedented in world history has been born. Millions have been arrested and stripped of basic civil and human rights.

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.

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.

The extraordinary nature of individual black achievement in formerly white domain certainly does suggest that the old Jim Crow is dead, but it doesn't necessarily mean the end of racial caste - if history is any guide, it may have just taken a different form.

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

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.

Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs

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'.

We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.

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.

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.