[2] She spent her early childhood in Stelle, Illinois until 1977, when the family moved to the San Francisco area, where her father worked as a salesman for IBM.

As an associate at Saperstein, Goldstein, Demchak & Baller, she specialized in plaintiff-side class action suits alleging race and gender discrimination.

In it, she argued that systemic racial discrimination in the United States resumed following the Civil Rights Movement, and that the resumption is embedded in the US War on Drugs and other governmental policies and is having devastating social consequences.

"[9] The New Jim Crow described how oppressed minorities are "subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, public benefits, and jury service, just as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents once were.

[16] Yale University clinical law professor James Forman Jr., while acknowledging many similarities and insights in the Jim Crow analogy, has argued that Alexander overstates her case for decarceration, and leaves out important ways in which the newer system of mass incarceration is different.

Alexander refers to electronic ankle monitoring practices as the "Newest Jim Crow," increasingly segregating people of color under bail reform laws that "look good on paper" but are based on a presumption of guilt and replace bail with shackles as pre-trial detainees consent to electronic monitoring in order to be released from jail.

Alexander said: "Today there are more African American adults, under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the Civil War began.

[22] Stewart at the time was a senior associate at McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, a San Francisco law firm,[23] and later was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio.

[23] In a 2019 opinion piece for the New York Times, written subsequent to the passing of the Ohio "Heartbeat Bill", Alexander wrote of being raped during her first semester of law school, becoming pregnant as a result, and then aborting the pregnancy.