Michelle Alexander is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University and a civil rights advocate, who has litigated numerous class action discrimination cases and has worked on criminal justice reform issues. She is a recipient of a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship of the Open Society Institute, has served as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School and was a law clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun at the U. S. Supreme Court. Michelle Alexander has published the book The New Jim Crow, in which she argues that systemic racial discrimination in the United States has resumed following the Civil Rights Movement's gains, implicit but legalized and of devastating social consequences, with the domestic War on Drugs and other governmental policies. She considers the scope and impact of this current law enforcement, legal and penal activity to be comparable with that of the Jim Crow laws of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her book concentrates on the mass incarceration of African-American men.[1]
In her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), Alexander argues that mass incarceration in America functions as a system of racial control in a similar way to how Jim Crow once operated. Alexander’s work draws attention to the racial disparity that exists in the criminal justice system. Alexander notes, “Race plays a major role-indeed, a defining role – in the current system, but not because of what is commonly understood as old-fashioned, hostile bigotry. This system of control depends far more on racial indifference (defined as a lack of compassion and caring about race and racial groups) than racial hostility – a feature it actually shares with its predecessors.”[2]