Michelle Alexander - Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination - employment d

Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination - employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service - are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and largely less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

- Michelle Alexander

source: "A Bitter Harvest: California, Marijuana, and the New Jim Crow". "Bringing Down the New Jim Crow" with Chris Moore-Backman, www.prx.org. November 15, 2011.