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Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
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6 Oct, 6 tweets, 2 min read
Thread. Here is the Democratic Party District Attorney in Houston working with local Fox station on unhinged racist rants about "predators," "anarchy" and "violent, repeat offenders" who will "maim, rob, and kill fresh victims." fox26houston.com/news/harris-co…
Know the context: these racist rants come as the metro area has record of more than $2 billion police/jail budget, as "violent crime" is at historic lows, and as all data shows even modest bail reforms have been success. This is how threatening even *talk* of reform can be.
Why are they so scared? Profits for bail industry are declining and officials are starting to talk about investing in community-based alternatives to human caging in public health, schools, restorative justice. First step in bail reform a huge success:
Ogg's series of rants looks against local Black and Latino officials looks a lot like the Trump/Giuliani rants in the early 1990s in NYC, when NYPD cops staged a riot protesting the Black mayor. This leads to a very dark place. nymag.com/intelligencer/…
You can read more about what's really going on here, and you can learn that the 16th person this year has just died in the downtown Houston jail, most of them because they were too poor to secure their release:
And here is a set of resources for responding whenever someone tells you that cops, prosecutors, and jails need more resources because of "crime is up."

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More from @equalityAlec

Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
5 Oct
Today marks the end of our four-year lawsuit against prosecutors in New Orleans to end their practice of using fake subpoenas and fraudulent material witness warrants to jail survivors of crime to coerce their testimony. The story is unbelievable.
For years under DA Leon Cannizzaro, DAs in New Orleans fabricated documents that looked like official court documents in order to trick crime victims into private meetings at the DA's office. When many didn't cooperate, they had them illegally jailed. newyorker.com/news/news-desk…
The case is a vivid example of the real interests pursued by punishment bureaucrats who are willing to separate children, cage the most vulnerable people in the community, and threaten crime survivors if they do not participate in a charade of further state violence.
Read 5 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
1 Oct
THREAD. This is one of the most disturbing stories I have seen in a long time: a huge corporation that profits from separating parents from their children and then charging monopoly prices for jail phone calls is partnering with Sesame Street.
The company is GTL. Along with Securus, it dominates the profiting off mass human caging. GTL and Securus worked with jails to end in-person visits so that people too poor to pay bail cannot see or hug their kids. Why? Because then they spend more $$, with kickbacks to the jails.
Now, using the very money it extracted from some of the poorest families in our society--families too poor to buy their loved ones out of jail--GTL is laundering its reputation by partnering with Sesame Street to teach children about "coping with incarceration" of their parents.
Read 5 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
29 Sep
THREAD: It is with sadness that I tell you about Justin Henderson, who died in the downtown Houston jail. He was trapped there during a pandemic because he couldn't pay a few hundred dollars in cash. Although no media reported his death, his story is important.
Justin Henderson was 35 years old. He was diagnosed with mental health issues and an intellectual disability. He was forgotten in a jail cell because Judge Hilary Unger (a Democrat) required him to pay cash bail, and he couldn't even pay the bail premium.
Before his arrest, he was free in the community on a form of diversion after a minor charge of evading a police officer. A problem was that he couldn't get a job and so couldn't pay the fees judges and prosecutors required him to pay in order to be free.
Read 13 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
27 Sep
Thread. What is happening right now at the New York Times is important and dangerous. I've tried to document it thoroughly below.
Last week, NYT published a major story that suggested falsely that police prevent murder and that one reason for increased murders during a global pandemic was civil rights criticism of police! The NYT did not disclose that the reporter was former CIA/Palantir/police/DA paid.
I wrote a thread criticizing a few of the most obvious flaws in the article, including the failure to disclose the writer's corporate and police conflicts of interest. Instead of engaging, the reporter just blocked me (after the article .
Read 21 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
25 Sep
Out of all the bad journalism I’ve seen, this headline in the @sfchronicle is probably the worst I’ve seen. It poses a scandalous question about whether the DA is “letting criminals roam free” but the article is just about whether the courts make data accessible or not. Image
The headline is designed to scare people. “Criminals!” Are they “roaming???” Article has no evidence of whatever roving bands of super-predators the paper is trying to conjure—it’s just about how the courts aren’t good at sharing information. You can’t make this nonsense up.
In fact the headline itself is just posing the question. Do you “think” the San Francisco Chronicle’s reporting is responsible for over one thousand deaths of small children? Well, there’s no evidence of that, but I’m just “objectively” posing the question.
Read 6 tweets
Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
24 Sep
This is HUGE GOOD news: The data is in from Texas, and our @CivRightsCorps federal court victory striking down the money bail system has released tens of thousands of people from cages, saved millions of dollars, and made the community safer. Look at these numbers:
Before we sued, about 40% of people charged with misdemeanors were caged away from their families before trial. That was about 20,000 people every year. Now, 90% of the human beings charged with misdemeanors are released.
Before we sued, about 60% of cases ended in a conviction, trapping the poorest people in an endless assembly line cycle of jail-->fines/fees-->license suspension-->jail. Now, because people are free and not coerced into pleading guilty, 68% of cases end in dismissal or acquittal!
Read 15 tweets

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