Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News by Alec Karakatsanis

From New Press: From the prizewinning rising legal star, the deeply researched and definitive book on the way the media and police distract us from what matters “Alec Karakatsanis is a leading voice in the legal struggle to dismantle mass incarceration. . . . What he says cannot be ignored.”—James Forman‚ Jr. “Copaganda” is a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media. It stokes fear of police-recorded crime and distorts society’s responses to it. As the United States incarcerates five times more people per capita than it did in 1970—despite record low crime rates—a sprawling and profitable punishment bureaucracy spends a lot of time and money to manipulate what we think that bureaucracy does and why. Copaganda is all around us. When you hear on the radio that crime is up when it’s actually down—that’s copaganda. When your local TV station obsessively focuses on shoplifting by poor people while ignoring crimes of wage theft, tax evasion, and environmenta