About Michelle Alexander

As a long-term civil rights advocate and litigator, Michel Alexander won the 2005 Soros Judicial Scholarship and is currently co-ordinated by the Moritz Law School of Ohio State University and the Kyle Bun Race and Race Association. Alexander has served as Director of Racial Justice Program for many years at ACLU in northern California and is a pioneer of a national campaign against racial profiling. In the beginning of her career, she served as a legal assistant to the US Supreme Court judge Harry Blackmon. She lives in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio.

I recently participated in a conversation about Michelle Alexander 's book "New Jim Raven". It is sometimes very hot, but this is a civilian. Many of us say we are irritated by the "fair" drug war that has been condemned in all these decades. We were sold to politicians one after another. In an article on Harper's recent drug legalization, a stunning opening article by reporter Dan Baum provides a good ending for Alexander's book. I talked about encounters with John Elysman and Nixon accomplices and one of the internal circle advisors who confirmed the irony intentions of Nixon behind the drug fight. This is a tragic legacy troubling us.

Michelle Alexander is the author of The Best Journal The New Jim Crow, a supporter of civil rights, a lawyer, a law scholar and a professor. She told FRONTLINE how the drug war produced a system dedicated to mass imprisonment and what it means to the American today. This is the editing record of the interview which took place on September 5, 2013. Mass imprisonment is a huge system of ethnic and social control. In the process, people participate in the criminal justice system and brand offenders and felons are detained for a longer time than most other countries around the world, and are released as permanent after imprisonment with crime. They are deprived of the second-class status of basic civil rights and human rights, such as voting rights, the jury's right, the right not to be discriminated in employment, housing and public welfare.

As Michel Alexander said, mass prison is a new Jim Raven of the US New Race Caste system. This is the latest version of the generation Alexander calls "criminalizing and blackening of blacks". The fundamental cause of this imprisonment epidemic can not be solved by public policy alone. The obsession for American punishment is deeply rooted in a satisfying concept of whether there is always clear "correct" and "wrong" and which a small percentage of the population should choose. Over the centuries the call for primitive and horrible instincts proved to be good politics, and the concept of forgiveness, reconciliation, and even compromise was considered betrayal or innocence.