Made Local: Alec Karakatsanis

From the prizewinning rising legal star, the deeply researched and definitive book on the way the media and police distract us from what matters

“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

Join Alec Karakatsanis for a discussion of how we can think about copaganda in 2026, including the role of civil rights law and propaganda in times of rising authoritarianism, as well as how civil rights lawyers and communities can use the arts, storytelling, and narrative to resist and build human connection.

“Copaganda” is a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media. It stokes fear of police-recorded crime and distorts society’s responses to it. As the United States incarcerates five times more people per capita than it did in 1970—despite record low crime rates—a sprawling and profitable punishment bureaucracy spends a lot of time and money to manipulate what we think that bureaucracy does and why.

Pittsburgh native Alec Karakatsanis 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. He is a graduate from Yale College with a degree in Ethics, Politics, & Economics and Harvard Law School, where he was a Supreme Court Chair of the Harvard Law Review Before founding Civil Rights Corps, Alec was a public defender representing impoverished people accused of crimes in Alabama and Washington, D.C. Among other awards, Alec was named the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year by Public Justice and received the prestigious 2023 New Frontier Award from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

He is the author of two books and also writes Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter. Alec 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.