My impression back then was that our criminal-justice system was infected with racial bias, much in the same way that all institutions in our society are infected to some degree or another with racial and gender bias. I had a very romantic idea of what civil-rights lawyers had done and could do to address the challenges that we face. That’s why I was a civil-rights lawyer: I was hoping to finish the work that had been begun by civil-rights leaders who came before me. I was well aware that there was bias in our criminal-justice system, and that bias pervaded all of our political, social, and economic systems. It was just as I was beginning my work with the A.C.L.U.

That would have been twenty years ago from today. When “The New Jim Crow” came out, a decade ago, you said that you wrote it for “the person I was ten years ago.” Take me back to those times and to the work you were doing for the A.C.L.U. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The book considers not only the enormity and cruelty of the American prison system but also, as Alexander writes, the way the war on drugs and the justice system have been used as a “system of control” that shatters the lives of millions of Americans-particularly young black and Hispanic men.Īs part of an hour-long examination of mass incarceration for The New Yorker Radio Hour, co-hosted this week by Kai Wright, of WNYC, I caught up with Michelle Alexander, who is now teaching at Union Theological Seminary, in New York.

Ten years ago, Michelle Alexander, a lawyer and civil-rights advocate, published “ The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” This was less than two years into Barack Obama’s first term as President, a moment when you heard a lot of euphoric talk about post-racialism and “how far we’ve come.” “The New Jim Crow” was hardly an immediate best-seller, but after a couple of years it took off and seemed to be at the center of discussion about criminal-justice reform and racism in America. Sometimes a book comes along and, after it is absorbed into the culture, we cannot see ourselves again in quite the same way.

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander