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I first read Copaganda, the treatise by Civil Rights Corps founder Alec Karakatsanis, as the “surge” of the president’s private police forces into American cities was beginning. We connected for a conversation last week, as an extraordinary copaganda campaign was attempting to rewrite the narrative of the chaos and destruction that armed officers of the state had wrought in Minneapolis—which saw calls for “ICE Out” misdirected into advocacy for more body cameras and training.
In this episode Alec and I discuss his legal background and the work of Civil Rights Corps, the size and scope of the U.S. punishment bureaucracy, copaganda’s co-opting of mainstream liberal discourse to support “reforms” like police-worn body cameras, observations from the second Trump administration’s deployment of federal policing forces, and what regular citizens can do to dismantle the punishment bureaucracy and deprogram its entrenched apologists. I hope you enjoy it.
More About Alec Karakatsanis
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.
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.
Important Links
* Copaganda: How Police and The Media Manipulate Our News
* Alec Karakatsanis - The Copaganda Newsletter
* “The Body Camera” The Language of Our Dreams”
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