Alec is the Founder and Executive Director of Civil Rights Corps. He has pioneered constitutional civil rights cases to challenge the size, power, profit, and everyday brutality of the punishment bureaucracy across the United States. These legal challenges have helped to free hundreds of thousands of people from jail, returned tens of millions of dollars to indigent people and families, prevented hundreds of thousands of illegal convictions, prevented the separation of thousands of families, and transformed the way the U.S. criminal punishment bureaucracy handles fines, fees, and bail. Alec has also worked with directly impacted communities across the U.S. to design innovative new legal, advocacy, and narrative strategies for challenging widespread illegal and harmful practices of prosecutors, police, probation officers, judges, and private companies who work with them to profit from the punishment bureaucracy.

Alec graduated from Yale College in 2005 with a degree in Ethics, Politics, & Economics and Harvard Law School in 2008, where he was a Supreme Court Chair of the Harvard Law Review. Before founding Civil Rights Corps, Alec was a civil rights lawyer and public defender with the Special Litigation Division of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia; a federal public defender in Alabama, representing impoverished people accused of federal crimes; and co-founder of the organization Equal Justice Under Law. You can read a profile about Alec’s work starting Civil Rights Corps challenging modern debtors’ prisons in Harvard Magazine here.

Alec lectures widely about the failures of the criminal punishment bureaucracy, typically giving more than 100 lectures, speeches, trainings, media interviews, and workshops each year. He was awarded the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award by Public Justice and the Stephen B. Bright Award for contributions to indigent defense in the South by Gideon’s Promise. His work at Civil Rights Corps challenging the money bail system was honored with the Champion of Public Defense Award by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. He was also awarded the 2023 New Frontier Award from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

Alec is the author of two books, Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System (2019) and Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News (2025). He also writes a popular newsletter called Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter and regularly collaborates with visual artists, poets, musicians, and filmmakers to produce art about the punishment bureaucracy.

Alec is interested in genuine holistic safety for everyone and ending human caging, surveillance, police, the death penalty, immigration laws, war, and inequality. He also likes playing the piano and soccer, collecting rocks, singing, growing flowers, creating mosaics from dried flowers, repeating the same jokes until they become funny, writing poetry, and making weird paintings on large pieces of wood and metal.You can watch Alec talk about Copaganda in the media on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and The Breakfast Club. You can also watch Alec discuss the groundbreaking Right2Hug campaign, and how civil rights lawyering can challenge authoritarianism. He also writes a regular newsletter called Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter. You can check it out here!