Towards abolition: challenging mass incarceration and money bail

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Alec Karakatsanis, founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, will discuss how the criminal punishment system in the United States has metastasized to levels unprecedented in the modern recorded history of the world. Using examples from his work challenging the money bail system and modern debtors’ prisons, his experience as a public defender, and his years of experience litigating cases of police, prosecutor, and judicial misconduct in federal courts across the country, Alec will discuss the current abolition and defund the police movements in the U.S, as well as the role of the media and public narrative in preserving the architecture of the punishment bureaucracy in the face of these social movements.

Alec Karakatsanis is the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps. 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 non-profit organization Equal Justice Under Law. Alec was awarded the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year by Public Justice for his role in designing and bringing constitutional civil rights cases to challenge various aspects of the punishment bureaucracy across the United States and the 2016 Stephen B. Bright Award for contributions to indigent defense in the South by Gideon’s Promise. Alec’s work at Civil Rights Corps challenging the money bail system in California was honored with the 2018 Champion of Public Defense Award by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Most recently, Alec is the author of Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System (The New Press, 2019).