Alec Karakatsanis

Alec Karakatsanis (born November 7, 1983) is an American civil rights lawyer and author. He is the founder of Civil Rights Corps, a non-profit organization founded in 2016 that files civil rights lawsuits in the U.S. legal system. Karakatsanis' legal work has targeted, among other things, the American money bail system. He has written and spoken extensively about police and prison abolition and the negative impacts of copaganda, propaganda efforts to improve public perception about police and law enforcement. In 2016, Karakatsanis was awarded the Stephen B. Bright Award by Gideon's Promise and the Trial Lawyer of the Year Award by Public Justice. He has published several books including Usual Cruelty and Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News.

Early life and education Alec Karakatsanis was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Yale University in 2005 with a degree in Ethics, Politics, & Economics. intending to focus on school desegregation and education policy.

Civil Rights Corps Karakatsanis founded the legal nonprofit Civil Rights Corps in 2016 after leaving EJUL.

Pre-trial imprisonment In 2014 and 2015, Karakatsanis and his colleagues brought multiple class-action lawsuits against municipal courts across the United States, challenging wealth-based detention practices. The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, The Marshall Project, and The New York Times. He has appeared on various podcasts.

He has provided commentary on the consequences of private prisons.

His book Usual Cruelty consists of three essays. He argues that lawyers have become blinded and thus complicit in the usual cruelty of the American criminal legal system. He writes: "The legal profession and the doctrines that it produces exhibit a willful blindness to the extent of the physical and psychological punishments that we perpetrate." One review provided commentary on his use of wordsmithing to provide commentary on the criminal legal system. He believe the mainstream news media perpetuates fear of crime and a hero mythology around police. He refers to a "punishment bureaucracy" in the United States. He believes that the bureaucracy is a system that devotes an enormous amount of resources to policing certain laws when certain people break them, but overlooks that common offenses of the wealthy, like wage theft and corporate crimes.

Selected publications

Books

Law review articles

"It is time to end poverty jailing." Pub. Admin. Rev. 75 (2015): 791.

Sebastian, Thea L., and Alec Karakatsanis. "CHALLENGING MONEY BAIL IN THE COURTS." Judges' Journal 57.3 (2018). "The punishment bureaucracy: How to think about "criminal justice reform" Yale Law Journal Forum. Vol. 128. No. 1. 2019. "The Body Camera: The Language of Our Dreams." Yale JL & Liberation 4 (2024): 11-14.

News articles

"Police Departments Spend Vast Sums of Money Creating 'Copaganda'" Jacobin. July 20, 2022

Awards 2016: Trial Lawyer of the Year (Public Justice) 2016: Stephen B. Bright Award (Gideon's Promise) 2016: Emerging Leader Award (Johnson Institute for Responsible Leadership at the University of Pittsburgh) 2023: John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award