Alec Karakatsanis Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Alec Karakatsanis

The second part of my series, The Big Deception, is now published. This piece offers a disturbing look at specific examples of how the New York Times misleads its readers about the intentions of people in power. https://t.co/qhXIbJA7Cw https://t.co/eIYDUfxBNj

Alec Karakatsanis

Yes, family policing too! Read the book Torn Apart by Dorothy Roberts, and read it urgently. https://t.co/KXhh7cYROO

Alec Karakatsanis

As we see corporate Democratic party discourse on crime and a profound lack of appreciation in elite liberal circles of the authoritarian threat we face across a wide range of issues, I have been thinking about this Daniel Guerin quote from his 1938 book Fascism and Big Business: https://t.co/05cCYopzdy

Alec Karakatsanis

It would be a useful exercise for New York based reporters to think about why “the realities of fear” are so inconsistent with “data.” If you are a journalist covering public safety and haven’t read Stuart Hall’s brilliant book Policing the Crisis, you should immediately. https://t.co/fSoxkbiHEJ

Alec Karakatsanis

@JillFilipovic Another good book that covers some related issues is America Beyond Capitalism by Gar Alperowitz, as well as The Solutions Are Already Here by Peter Gelderloos.

Alec Karakatsanis

@JillFilipovic I’d also recommend the brilliant book by legendary Yale anthropology professor James C Scott called two cheers for anarchism. A lot of people have written about how we need a lot less work, and that’s the only way to meaningfully participate in democratic processes.

Out of stock

Alec Karakatsanis

It’s good to make prisons and jails less cruel. But the constant marketing of reforms (after all, prisons themselves were sold as a “reform”) as consistent with liberatory ideologies is a marketing tool. Eugene Debs’s prison memoir Walls and Bars is a timeless classic on this.

Alec Karakatsanis

Substack is cropping my painting to incorrectly make it look like a flag. It’s part of a series in different colors of flowering vines on prison walls inspired by Jackie Wang’s amazing book Carceral Capitalism.

Alec Karakatsanis

I'm reminded of the book the Anti-Politics Machine by Stanford Anthropologist James Ferguson. I recommend it for many reasons, but especially: we must identify ways in which elites can depoliticize issues by creating bureaucracies and languages of purported technical expertise.

Alec Karakatsanis

I just started reading Coal, Cages, Crisis by @judahschept about the political economy of prison construction in Appalachia. It's fantastic so far. I highly recommend, and its lessons and insights expand far beyond Appalachia.