Michelle Alexander is an American civil rights lawyer, legal scholar, and author best known for her work on racial injustice in the U.S. criminal justice system. She has served as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California and has taught at several universities, including Ohio State University and Union Theological Seminary. Alexander gained international recognition with her groundbreaking book The New Jim Crow, which exposed how mass incarceration functions as a system of racial control in the post–civil rights era.
Alexander’s work bridges legal analysis, critical race theory, and criminology, providing a compelling critique of the prison-industrial complex. She argues that the War on Drugs and the resulting mass incarceration have created a racial caste system, disproportionately impacting African Americans and other marginalized communities. Her analysis reframes criminal justice reform as a central issue in the struggle for racial and social justice.
