Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robertson. I am the editor inchief of Current Affairs Magazine.

My guest today is Alec Karakatsanas.

He is the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps.

He is also the author of Usual Cruelty, the complicity of lawyers in the criminal injustice system. He also writes,

at the moment, Alex Coppaganda newsletter on Substack. He can be found on Twitter at equality.

Alec, Alec, welcome to Kurt Affairs.

Thank you so much for having me, Nathan.

The Copaganda newsletter that you publish now,

one of your main targets is mainstream media reporting

on criminal punishment, on prosecution, on policing.

And I want to devote the bulk of our conversation to going through the various ways in which people's perception is manipulated through the way that the press presents the facts.

But I think where I'd like to start is with the big thing that is left out.

Because I think, as I read what you write on this, what comes to my first is that so many of the press accounts, yes, they distort things

in various ways, yes, they're pro-police, but they're missing the big picture. Let's start with

the big picture of the American criminal punishment system. The things that we should all bear in

mind in any conversation about this, the starting points

for our discussion that we don't want to get lost in our news analysis. I think the most

important thing that is unstated in almost all media coverage of the criminal punishment

bureaucracy and more

broadly issues of safety, is that the United States is currently caging human beings at a rate

that is unprecedented, not only in its own history, but in the recorded history of the modern

world. So we're caging people at five times the rate that the United

...