Description: "An exploration of "copaganda"-propaganda employed by police and news media"--Provided by publisher.
Brief description:
Alec Karakatsanis founded the Civil Rights Corps, an organization that challenges systemic injustices in the U.S. legal system. In the last decade, the organization's work has freed hundreds of thousands of people from illegal confinement in jail cells, reunited hundreds of thousands of families, returned tens of millions of dollars to marginalized communities, and advanced inspiring alternatives to punishment as a means of preventing and addressing social harm. He was named the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year by Public Justice for designing and litigating landmark constitutional challenges to cash bail and modern debtors' prison practices across the United States. The author of Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System and Copaganda (both from The New Press), he lives in Washington, DC.
Review Quotes: Praise for Copaganda:
"Karakatsanis provides a primer on how to read and assess news stories and opinion pieces."--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"An instructive, often enraging look at how elite publications mounted a sustained defense of the status quo after the police murder of George Floyd touched off the largest political mass movement in U.S. history."
--The New Republic
"Karakatsanis's close readings of news articles from major outlets show that journalists habitually regurgitate pro-police narratives--many of which revolve around how more funding for law enforcement is needed to bring down crime rates--and omit the perspectives of non-police experts and studies showing that law enforcement has no correlation with crime rates. . . . Readers will be aghast."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Alec Karakatsanis exposes our criminal injustice system for what it is: a bureaucracy of punishment, propped up by a biased media machine that feeds mass incarceration. After Copaganda, you'll never read the news the same way again."
--Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
"Alec Karakatsanis is a gifted civil rights lawyer and a fearless guide to the urgent project of calling out the many failures of modern coverage of crime and justice. Only by really understanding those failures--why, for instance, news outlets tend to ignore ubiquitous crimes like wage theft but spill endless ink on certain street crimes--can we hope to heal our communities."
--Sarah Stillman, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and staff writer, The New Yorker
"Karakatsanis cuts to the heart of the rancid politics of crime, and the ways in which journalists and academics reproduce inequality and immiseration by legitimating America's massive punishment bureaucracy. Copaganda is a masterful analysis, a call to action, and a blueprint for change."
--Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing