Michelle Alexander

Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer, legal scholar, and writer whose work examines race and the American legal system. The New Jim Crow argues that policies associated with mass incarceration created a durable structure of racial inequality after the formal end of segregation. The New Press first released it in 2010; a tenth-anniversary edition followed. Alexander's publisher biography records her leadership of the Racial Justice Project at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, her teaching in law, and her clerkship for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. Her book connects legal rules, policing, sentencing, public language, and the lasting civic consequences of a criminal record.