Key points:
- Civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis critiques elite media institutions for normalizing mass incarceration.
- Karakatsanis accuses The New York Times of promoting misleading narratives on law enforcement intentions.
- He argues that the media focuses on well-meaning prosecutors instead of the true beneficiaries of incarceration.
In a searing new essay titled Copaganda and Authoritarianism, civil rights attorney and founder of Civil Rights Corps Alec Karakatsanis accuses elite media institutions of helping normalize mass incarceration by distorting the intentions behind it. Delivered first as a TED-style talk in San Francisco to an audience that included former President Barack Obama, Karakatsanis’s central argument is that liberal institutions—through omission, glorification, and deference—play a critical role in enabling authoritarianism.
“The moment people stop saying that 2+2=4,” Karakatsanis said, “everything is lost.” For him, truth-telling in the face of systemic deception is not just a moral imperative—it is a form of resistance.
He focuses much of his critique on the New York Times, which he says recently published a “hagiography” of a federal prosecutor whose career was built on caging low-income people in the Bronx and Vermont amid the opioid crisis. The article, he writes, “contains an assertion, reported as fact, that this prosecutor ‘was trying to make safer’ one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York through mass human caging for drugs.” He calls the framing not only misleading but fundamentally dishonest.
“This statement of fact about her intentions is absurd,” Karakatsanis writes. “The people involved are not stupid; they knew that the War on Drugs/mass incarceration had been disproven by evidence as a means of reducing dangerous drug use or making anyone safer.” According to Karakatsanis, it was never about safety. “Everyone involved knows that ‘safety’ was never the point of the War on Drugs!”
He says the Times article exemplifies what he calls “The Big Deception,” which he details in his book Copaganda: the media’s tendency to focus on the supposed good intentions of law enforcement officials while ignoring the structural purposes and consequences of mass incarceration. “The focus on asserted intentions distracts from why policies persist despite their failure,” he writes. “The war on drugs was a solution in search of a problem.”
Karakatsanis is particularly scathing about how the media turns social problems like addiction, homelessness, and violence into morality tales involving heroes and villains. “This is a copaganda classic,” he writes of the article. “Mass incarceration is portrayed as something only being done because they are trying so hard to make life better for the poorest communities. There’s no other reason. Nothing to see here!”
The cost of this misrepresentation, he argues, is immense. By centering the narrative on supposedly well-meaning prosecutors, the media deflects attention from the powerful political and economic interests that benefit from incarceration: “Almost no daily news article on the topic discusses the benefits of current drug policies to private prisons, pharmaceutical companies, police unions, the bail bond industry, the multi-billion-dollar carceral telecommunications industry, probation departments, [and] real estate developers.”
In Copaganda, Karakatsanis emphasizes that falsifying the motivations of powerful people is a central feature of propaganda. “Why has falsification of intentions been central to propaganda for over a hundred years?” he writes. “It helps to ask two questions: (1) What benefits do people in power get from distorting their motivations? (2) How do people in power benefit from ordinary people misunderstanding the reasons people in power do things?”
He offers a blunt answer: “In general, powerful people in charge of public safety want us to think (1) that the problems of our society aren’t structural; (2) that they share our outrage at these problems; (3) that these problems can be fixed with little tweaks to the existing system rather than radical change; and (4) that they are doing everything they can to fix them.”
Karakatsanis also questions the journalistic standards of the Times and the decision-making of its editors. “Much of elite American journalism is so focused on a good story with heroes and villains and anecdotes that it forgets its most solemn obligation,” he writes. “The key to great journalism… is finding anecdotes that both get a lot of eyeballs and that help people understand the world better. Choosing the wrong anecdotes that mislead the public… is probably the single greatest feature of contemporary copaganda.”
What makes this even more disturbing, he notes, is the way these stories are then amplified by elite media figures. “The reporter of the story [re-tweeted] a New York Times editor raving about the story being ‘monumental’ and a ‘master class in reporting.’”
The article, in Karakatsanis’s view, ends on an especially cynical note, portraying social problems like opioid addiction as unsolvable tragedies rather than policy failures. “As if to say: ‘Well, we tried everything we can, so these problems are just gonna be with us forever,’” he writes.
He also reveals what the Times left out: the prosecutor now works at a corporate law firm defending some of the very institutions that profit from the punishment bureaucracy. “The very common career path for federal prosecutors to train and develop their skills sending the poorest people in our society to cages and then to earn millions achieving leniency for wealthy corporate defendants is one of the most revealing ways to understand the true purposes and effects of the U.S. criminal legal system.”
In his first book Usual Cruelty, Karakatsanis coined the term “punishment bureaucracy” to describe how U.S. courts and law enforcement operate less as justice-seeking institutions and more as machinery of control. That same critique animates his new work. “Understanding propaganda’s historical focus on intentions helps us see that… it is important to people with power that people without it are distracted from the roots of our problems and uncertain about how to change them,” he writes.
In a country that cages human beings at rates unmatched by any peer nation, Karakatsanis warns that public trust cannot survive continued deception. “When you keep telling people you’re trying really hard, but you are never able to solve the problem you identify, you lose their trust.”
He leaves readers with a stark challenge: “Maybe these people don’t even believe themselves. This is a foundational problem plaguing our society in a variety of domains.”
