Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Oct 9, 2021 6 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Thread: I was just invited to speak to students at Harvard about how to pursue social justice in the face of pressure to work for wealthy corporations. As I walked on campus, I passed the Arthur Sackler museum, and it got me thinking about how our society defines “crime.” ImageImage
Sackler built a fortune in part by pioneering new marketing techniques for exploiting drug monopolies and bribing doctors for prescribing his drugs. This was possible b/c U.S. criminal laws permit the rich to hoard even publicly funded patents that could save millions of lives.
We live in a society in which the wealthy have decided that it isn’t a “crime” to watch someone die by hoarding insulin medication developed with public investment but it is a “crime” to take a dose of insulin without paying for it.
As an aside, after he died, Sackler’s family and company caused the opioid epidemic using the bribery marketing techniques Arthur Sackler championed. But the family are still billionaires, and his name adorns buildings in the richest university in the world.
What about the poor? Police and prosecutors have gorged themselves on prosecuting human beings addicted to opioids, putting them in grotesque cages and taking them away from their children and loved ones. They used this crisis to squeeze record budgets for cops and prisons.
I discuss this concept with hundreds of interesting and infuriating examples here. It’s worth reading and thinking about how the concepts of “crime” and “law enforcement” are shaped by people who own things. yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-puni…

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More from @equalityAlec

Aug 11
THREAD. Today's orders by Trump federalizing D.C. police and deploying National Guard in D.C. in response to "out of control" crime are authoritarian. But I want to comment on something subtle lurking beneath the surface.
As with most media/politician talk about "crime," it is completely divorced from reality. D.C. crime is at historic lows. What police call "violent crime" is down 26% since last year. More broadly, it's been at multi-decade, historic lows for years. Image
So, how is this possible? What lays the groundwork for such ludicrous claims? The news media has been fear-mongering for years. Indeed, in my Copaganda book, I have a very interesting section about prominent Washington Post journalists using this same "out of control" language.
Read 9 tweets
Aug 1
THREAD. A recent poll shows that people in the United States suffer from mass delusion about crime. The results are alarming for Democrats. It should be a massive scandal for mainstream news, and it's a pillar of the authoritarian zeitgeist.
Only 9% of respondents correctly answered that murder rates in the U.S. have decreased a lot since 1990. today.yougov.com/topics/politic…Image
This is just simple "flat-earther" stuff. But it continues the broader fear-based delusion that has been gripping the population for years across a range of crime issues.
Read 9 tweets
Jul 16
The level of ignorance among liberal pundits about surveillance technology, police violence, and authoritarianism is astonishing. Just no effort to understand important issues before commenting on them.
The idea that the problem with what ICE is doing now is that it lacks hundreds of millions of dollars for surveillance technology is utterly a wild thing for someone to utter in public. Just an incredible thing to focus liberal energy on.
Read 5 tweets
Jul 13
THREAD. This week, the New York Times published a hagiography of a ruthless drug war prosecutor. I want to make a few important points about the most important kinds of misinformation that regularly appear in the New York Times and other mainstream news outlets. Image
First, something subtle. The below quote is a microcosm of the full article: it 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. Image
This statement of fact about her intentions is absurd—the people involved knew that mass incarceration had been disproven by as a means of reducing dangerous drug use or making anyone safer. Exactly the opposite was true: the policies were increasing violence, death, and lots of other suffering.
Read 23 tweets
Jul 7
THREAD. Something must be said about the New York Times. We are in the midst of a full-blown fascist takeover, and the NYT let one of its most dishonest reporters publish an article today full of misinformation arguing for massive new investments in police and surveillance.
The thesis of the article is that because American cops are so terrible at solving murder (and getting much much worse than they used to be), "experts" believe the U.S. must spend massively more money on hiring police and surveillance. Image
I have a chapter in my Copaganda book on how the news media cherry picks pro-police "experts"--a small group who are kind of like flat-earthers--and then tries to manufacture some kind of consensus. It's actually unbelievable when you lay it all out across outlets and articles.
Read 17 tweets
Jun 20
THREAD. As I visit London next week for the UK launch of my book Copaganda, I have to say publicly how outrageous the mainstream British media’s crime coverage is. It’s like they’ve studied the worst aspects of U.S. news culture while taking performance-enhancing drugs.
This may seem comical to U.S. news consumers who lived through the fake “retail theft” panic, but British press has worked itself into a frenzy in 2025 using the same playbook. Some of it is funny, but the effects will be devastating for British society. Look at BBC: Image
Here are some other recent examples from a smorgasbord of UK copaganda about low-level theft: “Broken Britain.” “Industrial-scale crime.” “Shoplifting crime wave." Image
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Read 16 tweets

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