Former Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Professor Michelle Alexander has been named a Heinz Award winner. The award, which includes a $250,000 cash prize, was announced Wednesday. Alexander is the author of “The New Jim Crow – Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
Alexander said recently on the public radio program “On Being,” that people of color with a criminal record face substantial adversity.
“You are stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement; like the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment and housing. You really are relegated to a permanent second-class status,” Alexander said.
The Heinz Foundation describes Alexander as a person at the vanguard of helping to transform the current judicial system, ‘moving us to become a more just society.’