Michelle Alexander

Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer, legal scholar and writer. A graduate of Vanderbilt University and Stanford Law School, she clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun and later directed the ACLU of Northern California’s Racial Justice Project. She has also taught law and held a visiting professorship at Union Theological Seminary.

Her nonfiction joins legal analysis, history and moral argument. She writes chiefly about racial inequality, the drug war and the lasting civic penalties attached to a criminal record. Her prose is direct and cumulative: statutes, policing practices and barriers to employment or housing are assembled into an argument about how institutions reinforce one another.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, first published in 2010, argues that mass incarceration operates as a system of racial control even though the law presents itself as colorblind. The book became a New York Times bestseller, received an NAACP Image Award and helped bring the relationship between race and incarceration into wider public debate. A tenth-anniversary edition appeared in 2020 with a new preface by Alexander.

Start with The New Jim Crow. It is Alexander’s defining work and the clearest introduction to her central argument: imprisonment is only one part of a larger structure that continues through disenfranchisement, stigma and exclusion after release.