Ep. 24 - Usual Cruelty of the Legal System with Alec Karakatsanis

Picture a single mom sitting on her couch in Houston with her one and three-year-old when suddenly the police are at her door and arrest her. They took her to jail. Put her children in foster care. She doesn’t know where they are or who cares for them. 

You might think this woman must be a dangerous criminal to justify disrupting this family and traumatizing these children. No. This happened because a mother could not afford to pay a court debt of a few thousand dollars. The Houston Courts then gave her the choice of sitting in jail at $25 per day to “pay her debt” or working as a janitor to “earn” slightly more money so she could get out of jail a little faster and try to find her babies.

This woman inspired Civil Rights Attorney Alex Karakatsanis, founder of Civil Rights Corp to file a lawsuit challenging this oppressive cash bail system.

In this episode, Alec Karakatsanis joins host Mary Whiteside and Prof. Lee Pierce to discuss his book Usual Cruelty - The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Justice System. 

Alec is a radical thinker challenging the status quo. He reframes the criminal justice system as a punishment bureaucracy. Alec challenges lawyers, in particular, “to examine why the punishment system exists and how it functioned throughout history as a mechanism of preserving white supremacy and the distribution of economic wealth and social control.” This interview also ran in the New Books Network Podcast series.

Find us on Twitter - Alec Karakatsanis is @equalityAlec and the podcast is @courtpod. 

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Sources:

• Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Justice System

https://www.amazon.com/Usual-Cruelty-Complicity-Criminal-Injustice/dp/1620975270/ref=asc_df_1620975270?tag=bingshoppinga-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=80539318468052&hvnetw=o&hvqmt=e&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=&hvtargid=pla-4584138864254121&psc=1 

• Civil Rights Corp:

https://civilrightscorps.org/alec-karakatsanis-founder-executive-director/ 

• Article on Willie Simmons: 

https://www.essence.com/news/willie-simmons-life-prison-alabama-habitual-offender/

• Danielle Ponder
• https://daniellepondermusic.com/