American civil-rights lawyer, legal scholar, and the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) — the book that, more than any other, shifted the American conversation about prisons from a question of criminal policy into a question of racial caste. Alexander was trained at Stanford Law, clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun, ran the ACLU of Northern California's racial-justice project, and has taught at Ohio State, the Kirwan Institute, and Union Theological Seminary.
The New Jim Crow makes a now-familiar but, at its publication, unfamiliar argument: the American carceral system, with its roughly 2.3 million prisoners and its vastly disproportionate Black representation, is not a set of individual cases of wrongdoing but a racial caste system functionally continuous with slavery and segregation. The War on Drugs built it, the legal doctrines of the 1980s and 1990s blessed it (McCleskey v. Kemp, the "colorblind" jurisprudence of the Rehnquist Court), and its effects — on voting rights, on housing, on employment, on the body of the Black American polity — now shape the limits of what American civil-rights language can even name. The book was slow to catch on and then very fast: it sat on the New York Times paperback best-seller list for more than 250 weeks and is among the most-assigned books of the past fifteen years of American academic life.
Her influence runs through Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative and its memorial work, through James Forman Jr.'s Locking Up Our Own (which complicated Alexander's picture from inside Black political history), and through the broader decarceration movement.