Police: America's Favorite Failure feat. Alec Karakatsanis 08.01.23

Child Free Day. I don't know what that means. Hopefully it just means, hey, do you World.

captured the attention and entire hearts of the gullible. And to that, I say to the moon that remained personally fascinated by the story, even if they're lying, like it's such a wild lie to tell on Capitol Hill. So anyways, I'm thrilled to be joined as a by my co host, mister Miles.

most recently the incredibly compelling Usual Cruelty. Most importantly a great follow on social media, please welcome the brilliant, the talented Alec carricotsons.

bit better. What is something sir from your search history. That's revealing about who you are.

corks for me. But but I, you know, I guess they don't drink enough, so I don't have enough wine quarks, right, And so I started searching, you know, how do you buy There's a whole market on.

I mean, we could be filling our society with beauty and providing hundreds of thousands of jobs in the process, all for just a tiny fraction of the money that

we spend destroying things. And for me working with artists, we do a lot of work in our organization with artists who've been in prison, artists who are thinking about how to create beautiful art in their communities that documents, you know, some of the horrific things that are happening, but also some of the hope and some of the beautiful things that people are coming up with in the

spheit of fighting back against these systems. And so we have an artist and a poet in residence every year in our organization who are people who've been in prison and who are now making a living as artists. And we've had exhibits in major museums across the country, and we're constantly trying to think about how do we tell the story of what's happening in the criminal punishment bureaucracy, which has a tendency to dehumanize and to become the

sort of assembly line system of punishment. How do we tell stories in a really different way that reaches people, maybe in a way that lawyers can't typically do it with their legal arguments, but through art, and so art has always been a really big Music has always been a big, really big part of my life.

act of painting seems seems to unlock things. Well, yeah, because you're you're quite You're like, it's another language you're using. If you're not make used to making, if you're not a visual artist, and you start doing like getting into the visual arts, you're gonna you're activating parts of your brain that you were not previously. So I can totally

see how that would be super creatively stimulating. Yeah. I think Blood on the Tracks was one that he talked about like painting being a big thing, like he was experimenting with new painting styles or something and that created new kind of concepts of time. Anyways, And that's not to say you are late in life, just later in life than most people start painting. I don't want to suggest you're an elderly man.

in powers while we need more prisons. You know, we've got a drug use problem, We've got prisons, We've got homelessness prisons. So I think the idea that prisons are somehow connected with our safety is one of the most extraordinary myths of our modern society. And in reality, what we know from decades of empirical research is that prisons actually don't reduce crime at all, and actually slightly increased crime.

And really importantly, and a lot of people don't know this, but every year in prison takes two years off a person's life expectancy. And so because the US imprisons so many people, and this is one of the most incredible statistics that no one knows, our overall life expectancy is an entire country is almost two years lower than it would be if we incartrate people the same as other

comparable countries like Europe, Canada, South America, et cetera. So we're literally with prisons costing hundreds of millions of life years in our society. It's really remarkable, and so I think prisons are one of the most overrated things in our society.

get jobs after they get out of prison. They can so like the longer you're away, the lesser you're able to enter their workforce, you're lesser able to find stable housing. So it's really remarkable and it's not discussed very much, but it has a huge impact on all of our life expectancies.

for the rest of his career. And you know, if I had to recommend one thing, super fun, short, amazing book called Utopia of Rules, which you can even read for free online, It's an incredible introduction into so many things about our society. Has everything in it, from a critique of the Batman movies, superheroes generally, to a critique of bureaucracy and capitalism and really great thoughts and ideas about how we live our lives. It's just an incredible

and a brilliant book. He was one of the leading anthropologists in the world, but he used those anthropology skills to really turn his eye toward analyzing some of the ways in which our society is actually incredibly violent. And he was also really interested in the concept of play, and he was a big proponent and that people should be working less and playing a lot more. And so he has other great essays, for example, on why it

is that the police hate puppets. He has really great work on why it is that animals really love to play and and why modern society is crushing the spirit of play and people. And so I think it's a really beautiful, funny, uplifting, but also very intelligent set of writing. So David Graeber is something I recommend. Its underrated.

is so great. Bullshit jobs we talked about a lot on the show, but yeah, the way The Dawn of Everything uses anthropology to like dig into like that there was that myth that like, well, even though like there are problems with modern society, you pink like pinker's a whole narrative that like when when you look before colonialism, things were a lot worse than like, everybody was way more violent, and he just like demolishes that and it's like, actually,

like we're way, way worse than those And then like takes you through some of the ways that civilizations that you don't learn about in generally in American educational systems organize themselves and like really interested in some like indigenous communities and valued these things that have been completely written

out of our society. And again like really makes you see the some of the assumptions that I think a lot of us take for granted on a day to day basis about the world we live in again with fresh eyes, it makes them kind of stick out to you as being as weird as they should seem to you. Why do police hate puppets? I Actually I've never read, so I'm going to immediately act on this underrated and

read Utopia of Rules. I've read, you know, Bullshit Jobs and History of Debt and The Dawn of Everything, but I never read Utopia of Rules.

It's about sort of the protest culture of the early two thousands and why police always target puppets when they go to protests, and why they always try to destroy puppets, and why police officers are so infuriated by my puppets. And I don't want to give too much away, but it's also a great essay.

and specifically the book Usual cruelty. So we'll be right back and we're back and Alec, you know, we can talk about how you're an author and a civil rights activist, but I'd be curious just to here kind of you talk about like your day to day and the ethos that drives you, Like what is your central kind of ethos that propels you and what is the work that

you're kind of doing on a regular basis. He kind of talked about it a little bit with working with imprisoned people and art and some of that, but you just kind of speak to how you use your life to address some of the things that you talk about in your book.

the chronal punishment pure acer she was. You know, so almost exclusively poor people who are prosecuted in our society, right about ninety percent of he'll prosecute are poor. The criminal punishment system has separated tens of millions of children from their parents in the last couple of decades in this country, with absolutely no evidence that it does any

good or makes anyone any better. And so I got I eventually became a public defender martian in DC, and then in twenty thirteen I got a grant from Harvard Law School to start my own nonprofit organization that you know, use a lot of the insights that I had learned from that work as a public defender, and really was a new project for me. I was trying to not defend individual criminal cases, but to affirmatively use civil rights laws, which are really powerful. You know, we have actually like

pretty decent civil rights laws on the books. We have in theory, at least in writing. We have a fairly decent constitutional protections. They are almost never obviously enforced in practice,

especially for poor people people of color. But the idea was, what would it look like if we use civil rights laws affirmatively to attack mass incarceration, to attack the really profitable centers of like revenue generation in the criminal punishment system, et cetera, and really try to stop the system from metastasizing the way that it was. And so for the last ten years I've been engaged in that project, and obviously that work is really, really difficult. We've had enormous success.

You know, our cases have gotten hundreds of thousands of people out of jail. You know, we've helped put the issue of the money bail system on the map. You know, in this country and the Philippines are the only two countries in the world with a for profit, multi billion dollar commercial money bail system where private corporations decide who's in jail and who's not pending trial. And that's a nasue.

We've worked on a lot. We've had enormous success on many many issues, is whether it's police brutality, prosecutor misconduct, the fines and fees system, where hundreds of thousands of people are jailed every year in this country just because they can't afford to pay debts to the court from things like traffic tickets, et cetera. But you know, after all of that work, the system really hasn't changed in

any kind of fundamental way. Over the last few years, we've made it, you know, a little bit less harsh. When I say we, I mean, you know, largely the people who are most impacted by the systems working in their own communities all over the country, with the assistance of sometimes you know, lawyers and organizers and others, but all of us collectively have been working on this for a long time. We've made some progress, but the fundamental

architecture of the system just continues to grow. And that's because, like any big government bureaucracy, with lots of people profiting it every single turn, it's really really hard to shrink it. There's at every stage, from the moment you're arrested until the moment you walk out of the prison door after serving twenty years sentence, someone is making a profit off

of every single thing that happens to you. They even got rid of in person visits at jails all over the country on the theory that if you let kids come in and hug their parents, they won't spend as much money on phone calls. And so they signed all these contracts in thousands of jails around the country to eliminate the ability of children to hug their parents because they wanted to charge higher rates and get more money for prison and jail phone and video calls. That's what

we're dealing with here. Yeah, and people like, you know, the person who owns the largest for profit telecom company for jails and prisons is also the owner of the Detroit Pistons, And it's very powerful. People in our society are making hundreds of millions of dollars off of every

single aspect of the system. And so every day, you know, my job looks like trying to identify new areas where people are being harmed and suffering, and meeting with families and organized and academics and researchers and other folks who care about these systems, and trying to come up with ways of solving these problems, whether it's policy solutions or sometimes a lot of time we have to sue people. We do a lot of suing people in court over

their violations of people's rights. And I think the one overriding thing that keeps me going is looking at these systems and how ineffective and wasteful and fraudulent they are. Like, I'm very confident that if more people in the US really knew what was happening in their name in these systems, they would not support them. It's scandalous. You know, the amount of money that's being wasted, amount of pain that's

being caused. We could very easily have a different world, and that that hope and that thought is really what keeps me going, right.

to me. Like if you sit people down and told them that stat there five hundred thousand people who are in prison tonight because they don't have enough money, like

that would fuck them up. Like if you just if you told them that that was the case about like Victorian England, like you know, Oliver twist Era, like that the ninety percent of people who are arrest it can't afford a lawyer like that, you know, they'd picture a world of debtor prisons like from some other time and like ours is worse than that shit, Right, there is a broad feeling that we talk about sometimes on this show that like, young people are more leftist than past generations.

Do you do you feel that, do you, like take any any hope in like the a sort of more leftward move of younger people as as they age, and as if the current generation and power ever rolling quishes power, like if they somehow don't figure out how to live forever, like the wind will eventually be at the back of people who are trying to make these changes.

in school. I'm not talking about you know, public schools in Florida now with the Santis' new curriculum, but I mean, just in general, if you look at like the classes that are being caught at universities, community colleges, grad programs, even high schools all over the country, there's a totally new awareness to these issues of racial justice, these issues of economic justice. I see it all the time talking to hundreds of teachers across the country about their curricula.

So I think, young people, if you look at some of the you know, subgenres in TikTok, you see like a lot more chatter about these issues than there was. At least this is only my anecdotal experience, but then I remember even fifteen years ago. However, like I worry

that some of this stuff is really superficial. The depth of understanding these systemic injustices and the systems that cause them, and the overlaying the layers of propaganda is really difficult, deep work that requires a lot of reading, a lot of experience, a lot of critical thinking, a lot of humility.

And so it's not just being able to say I hate capitalism, it's really being able to understand how it's functioning and also developing a deep personal commitment to making life better for everyone in our society that won't go away at the first sign of adversity that can be enduring, because any meaningful fight against these systems is very hard.

People make it unpleasant for you, and so I think it remains to be seen whether this generation has the depth of understanding and also the fortitude to keep going.

And that's why I talk to a lot of young people about the importance not only of watching videos and doing reading on your own, but getting involved with other people and building relationships and like building a set of people that you're in solidarity with and community with you can hold each other accountable, because doing this fight alone will inevitably isolate people and will inevitably make you give up.

And so the only chance that I see us having is taking some of this increased energy and building lasting relationships. And that's what I try to talk to young people about all the.

begin to see like the humanity of that. And I know that's like a huge bridge for I think a lot of people to cross. And to your point, like it's not enough about saying like, well, I don't like capitalism too, it's like, can you see all of these

relationships manifesting in front of you? Because especially like over the last few years, with so much talk about public safety or crime and things like that, I think we have so many things we have to begin to redefine as what they are, Like is crime the idea that there are just evil people out there who want to

fuck shit up? Or is it the fact that these are the society societal failures that are manifesting in certain you know, certain behaviors or people having to do things like survival crime or things like that, and understanding, well, where what are the like what actually makes us safe? Because I think right now the default is well, put

this put the scary poor people in fucking jail. Like that's and it just sort of our thinking ends there without really trying to grapple with like this idea of what is the system built for because it ain't justice, and then then diving into that reality, like what do you think, what are the what are the like I think important steps I guess for someone to begin to embrace that redefinition because I think that's something that people get scared of, because I think, well, then there's no jail,

then I'm not safe. And you know, like we have all these just sort of cliches that immediately kill like our ability to analyze it any deeper. Like, what what I guess for you and your work, how have you been able to really present these ideas for people to like what is the process of being able to fully embrace or becoming more sensitive to the humanity of it all and knowing what to do next?

police call violent crime. So you know, over the last few years in this country, the police have chosen to arrest more people from marijuana possessions than all violent crime combined. Police and prosecutors virtually ignore completely things like wage step packs of Asian corporate fraud. Right, These cause orders of

magnitude more harm than all their property crime combined. These are the kind of things that lead to hundreds of thousands of people dying through poverty, through eviction, through lost jobs, etc. Et cetera. Same thing with illegal dumping of chemicals in the water in the air. I mean one hundred thousand people die every year in this country because of air pollution.

That's five times the number of homicides combined. So we need to think about questions like, well, what are police spending their time on, right, Like, if you've got a force that chooses to arrest people for drug possession instead of testing rape kits right, that hardly ever investigates or arrest people for sexual assault, doesn't do undercover operations to uncover sexual assault, right, you know, cross and this is

the kind of thing I talk about usual cruelty. I give hundreds of examples like this, along with data and evidence to back them up. But the first step I think is understanding that although in the second half of the twentieth century we started to be told that the system of policing and punishment was to keep us safe, actually those systems were never developed to lead to holistic safety, right.

And if more policing and prisons and punishment made us safe, the US would be the safest society in the world because nobody else even comes close. But we're not the safest society in the world. We have lots of violence, right. And so one of the key things to understand is this system is not designed for safety or for justice,

but it is extremely profitable and beneficial. So, for example, if you're someone who benefits from inequality in our society, you might like a system that arrests and jails people who are homeless rather than builds new housing for them, right, or ensures that our society is more equal distribution of land.

So I think these are like fundamental social problems that when you when you stop to think about it, it's common sense that like things like crime are much more a function of poverty and inequality, lack of access to housing, lack of access to medical care. We know that, for example, one of the most important things in predicting future crime is investment in early childhood education. All of these things dwarf any impact that like a prosecutor or a police

officer have on crime. So the first step I would say to answer your question is really like deepening our understanding of what do these systems do and why do we have them? And from there, I think you can start to think about, well, what are some of the ways in other countries, other societies, certain places even in the US are actually adopting really different strategies to safety.

They're actually much more effective than these systems of punishment and pain that so much of the US isn't obsessed with.

It's just created an entire industry where people are profiting. So in that sense, like you're like, well, it's an l because you're not showing me anything that shows that the money spent is there. The return comes in the form of safety or lower crime, and that's like, you know, that's usually like the one thing that you're like, well then, and what do you say to that? And most people are like, well, I don't know, it's just like probably tough for whatever. It's like, no, it's cause it's not.

It's not designed to do that. Like look how many people, like people you know who are cops who brag about the overtime they get and then what their pensions look like, and they're like it's fucking sweet dude, Like I'm getting paid like six figures forever, like and that's it. It's not because I have I have any interest in doing, you know, about public safety, but because it's an arena that allows me to exercise absolute power and I get paid really handsomely for it.

system works and just talking about like, I don't know. Another detail that you bring up usual cruelty that made me see kind of this current system a little bit more clearly is I've never seen the war on drugs.

You know, the rise of the quote unquot war on drugs and this investment in just out of control aggressive caging of black bodies, and you know that next to the backing away from prosecuting white collar crime and like that, there was this two part movement like starting kind of in the eighties with Reagan where suddenly they stopped holding

corporations and you know, white collar people responsible. And we saw the result of that, or the culmination of that, I guess in the two thousand and eight economic crisis, where it was just you know, fraud on a massive scale that is costing everyone in America so much money and nobody is held accountable, right, and that is happening at the same time that they've decided to start caging other people for drug crimes, like crimes that you know,

it's been shown against bally that this doesn't make anyone safer from drugs.

to the DEA, to FBI terrorism and drug like. So, like, one of the things people don't really appreciate is police prosecutors only investigate and look for some crimes committed by some people some of the time, and the things that come into the criminal punishment bureaucracy are the things that they decide to look for. So if you take away we have several hundred fewer people in the Anti Trust

Division than we did in nineteen seventy nine. So if you take away hundreds of people that look for anti trust violations by companies, and you give those people a new job saying we want you to look for drug crimes committed by poor people and immigrants, and you're going to start prosecuting a lot more people because those are the cases that are brought into the system. It's the

same thing with local police. If you say to local police, we're going to give you financial incentives to set up a checkpoint in poor neighborhoods to pull over cars and search for drugs, instead of we're going to give you money to test rape kits from sexual assault survivors. You're going to start prostituting a lot more drug offenses than you are rape cases. And that's exactly what we've seen across the white collar spectrum in the US over the

last thirty or forty years. Just you can be very very safe if you're a white collar potential criminal, be very safe in knowing that you're very very unlikely to get caught because we just are not investing the sort of resources into looking for those crimes. That's why we have over one trillion dollars in IRS estimated tax evasion by wealthy people every year in the US. I mean that is to put that in perspective, that's about one

hundred times all other property crime combined. And when you hear in the news every day about these waves of shoplifting and organized retail theft, it's pales in comparison to the kind of crimes that the wealthy people are engaged in without anyone paying attention to it.

cvs too, obviously, And you know that's actually funny. That was I think one of the last things we did talk about when you came on the show, because the fucking idea of again these like these sort of media fed narratives that are purposefully kept to obscure our understanding of the horror or and the inhumanity of you know, this criminal punishment bureaucracy. Great phrase. I like that, like,

and I guess does that I'm imagining. That's why a lot of you, you're a lot of you have a lot of smoke for The New York Times too, because every time like we're like I was like, oh, Alex got another fire thread against the New York Times, Like I got to open this.

is spewing, right, and that's kind of widely understood. But ideologically what's so fascinating and so damaging and so harmful is that a lot of like, you know, self conscious liberals or self described liberals, I should say, people who think of themselves or who want to think of themselves

as progressive. You know, they're consuming these these news sources like NPR, the New York Times, the Atlantic that in many respects are spewing almost exactly the same authoritarian ideology, many of the same underlying assumptions, but those news sources have adopted like an air of sophistication, slightly different tone, slightly different words that are catered at their more liberal audience.

And so I think it's more interesting and potentially more you know, better use of my time rather than pointing out how every Fox News article is racist and is trying to you know, increase the profits of the bail industry whatever it is, pointing out how these these outlets that are seen as more prestigious, more liberal, more balanced, more objective, are actually doing many of the same things in a more sophisticated way that's harder to see for a lot of well meeting people. And that's why I've

focused a lot on New York Times in particular. That's why I find the Washington Post and pr MSNBC, CNN, you know, all these outlets that are doing a lot of the same right wing propaganda but under the guise of like objective even progressive news as being more harmful. And that's why I've focused on them a lot more.

book and not come to that same conclusion. But I think what we're talking about with regards to the New York Times and NPR, and you know that that is sort of the edifice and like sort of the barrier that is put in between people looking in the mirror, looking at each other and being like, wait, are we

the bad guys? So I'd love to kind of continue talking about like what what are some like watch words or just things that you see, Like you talk about how you your alarms go off when you see criminal justice reform as as a concept, or just like that phrase is like because it usually means that there's going to be more investment in prison and in the systems that jail people and police people but can you just talk a little bit more about like what you are

looking for when you read the New York Times or the Washington Post or you know, some of these liberal quote unquote l let's.

that's obvious, right. So they also do something I think really in the very which is they kind of make us think through the way they like tell their stories, through which stories they tell, through who they interview in these stories and who they don't interview, what perspectives they include, what perspectives they don't, what background context they choose to

provide versus choose to omit. They make us assume and think that these that the punishment bureaucracy is like acting in good faith, that it's like genuinely there to make us safe, that it's that the people who run it are trying their best to figure out these complex and difficult questions.

New York to deal with homelessness. So the entire article is sort of framed as like, well, the only options our society has are these government bureaucrats who are going to punish people into having housing, and so they an article after article, issue after issue. They make it seem like the only solution to these problems are more police,

prosecutors in prison. And then there's a whole other category of article, which I think maybe more what you're getting at with your question, which is like, sometimes the injustices and the brutality and the violence of this system becomes too much for them to ignore, so they usually ignore it.

Every day. But sometimes, like with the murder of George Floyd, the murder Eric Garner, the murder of Breonna Taylor, right, it's impossible for them to ignore because something really horrific has been captured in a way that captures the public imagination. And you know, the murder of Tyree Nichols and Memphis is a really good example of this with the New

York Times coverage that I wrote about. But what you see in those moments is a mobilization of copaganda that tries to get the well meaning reader, the people who don't want to live in a society of rampant police violence, of rampant racial injustice, to think that, well, something is being done about that, right, So they trot out all of these experts and all of these things, these these want these sort of these catchphrases like accountability and community policing. Right,

They never defined those terms. They never bring on any experts who say, did you know that in every major instance of police violence is nineteen thirty. Immediately afterward they started talking about the need for better training, more accountability, better technology for the police. And every single time over the last one hundred years, after police violence, the police have been given more resources, more training, more weapons, Right,

has it ever made police less violent? No? I mean, after all the conversations about George Floyd in twenty twenty, US police killed more people in twenty twenty one than they did in twenty twenty and then they killed even more people in twenty twenty two than they killed in

twenty twenty one. And so what I wrote about a lot in a series on my Substack, which is going to be in The Cop Again in the book, is an analysis of how does the punishment bureaucracy use its own failure under the guise of reform to actually increase its own budgets. I think the best possible example of this is body cameras. So body cameras are now trotted out as like the reform that everyone loves for illegal policing.

But what a lot of people don't understand is that for many years, the police and the multi billion dollar companies that produce the body cameras and the facial recognition software and the cloud computing databases that they rely on, they actually wanted to get every cop in the country a mobile surveillance camera that the cops themselves controlled. But they couldn't figure out how to get liberals in control of local governments to pay for them. There's billions of dollars, right,

so what do they do. They came up with a marketing strategy. After Michael Brown's murder in Ferguson, they came up with the marketing strateg to say, well, we need body cameras as a method of a police accountability. It's no longer about surveillance and increasing police control and et cetera. And the real reason they wanted them, you know, the biggest reason they wanted them was that since police control

of videos, they can use it. It's a much better form of evidence for prosecutors and police to coerce people to play guilty more quickly. So they turned this tool of surveillance that they all wanted but couldn't pay for into a tool of reform and then got all the money they needed. And that, to me is one of the most insidious roles of the media in the aftermath of so you know, another great examples of The York Times is when they did the summary of all the

George Floyd protests. They wrote these series of articles about how every major review in every major city had found that the police engaged in widespread brutality and illegal, illegal suppression of the protests. They were beating people, they were pepper spring people, they were using chemical weapons, they were using tanks and batons, they're hitting journalists, they're running over

their cars, et cetera. And the Times concluded that this was because they were unprepared and lacked training, and they lacked proper technology, and they didn't have enough intelligence to be tracking the protest leaders in the advance. So the Times framed what was in actuality a highly coordinated, consistent,

very well trained police response. If the purpose of the response was to squelch descent and repress so social movement, they made it seem like police were just hapless and with a little bit more money for better training and more money for intelligence divisions so they could infiltrate social

movement groups, police would have been better. And so framing the whole problem as one of actually police needing more training and more resources is I think one of the most insidious and nefarious roles that the mainstream corporate media has played in our understanding of what the real problems are.

I'm making right now. I mean, he's talking about this over one hundred, you know, about one hundred years ago, and it's remarkable to see how the system responded to him and how the prison system grew after that, right, and and how we're making the same points about the It's I think very review. When you read something like that, you can see we're not stuck in a prop way. It's not like we don't know the solutions. It's not

like we're dealing with something new here. These systems have been doing this for a long time.

idea of you know, what what liberation looks like. I really like the points that you make about how like, while there's no like just sort of magic solved to it, one part is about creating enough of a tipping point in terms of like mass movement for our courts and our politicians to respond to because without without a show of power from people, especially the ones that are most affected,

it takes a long time. Obviously, it takes decades for the Supreme Court to respond to anything, or you know, politicians because they're more like, yeah, what's the status quo, We'll reinforce that, great, what's the next case, versus seeing like, oh, it's this many people who think everything is absolutely backwards. Maybe we do need to consider that. What for you, I know you've you've talked about the importance of connection, but you know, for as we look towards something a

little more just something more equitable. What are those steps that you feel are the most potent things that you know we can kind of put to the front of our mind to understand. Well, I don't want to be obviously I'm not a lawyer or part of the you know, quote unquote legal system in a formal way. But how do I, as a conscious person contribute or put my head in the right space to know, Okay, this is how we move forward, and this is the way we need to all be moving.

And so I encourage you to like figure out like who in your local community is working on, you know, reducing the size and power of the punishment bureaucracy, who's trying to close a jail, Who's trying to prevent a jail from getting built. Who's trying to reduce the police budget and to get more money invested in alternative first responders and mental health care and housing. Who's organizing tenants,

who's building work around co ops. We need to be building the mechanisms through which all of us will connect and form stronger relationships and bonds. So I'm really if you're interested in the criminal system, I'm really interested in the growing movement of court watching. There's lots of groups in different cities across the country, whether it's the DC area where I am, or Pittsburgh where I grew up, or Los Angeles where we have our big case challenging

the money bail system. Because court watch programs are literally anyone and my mom did this when she retired, can sign up and to start watching court and documenting what the wh and prosecutors are doing and then reporting those in groups of people that you other sort of volunteers. Right, There's all kinds of things that flow from that. There's

getting involved in a local bail fund. There's running for local library board or the water board, or there's so many different things that actually, like conservatives have mobilized for and are therefore in charge of the utility commissions in a lot of different places, et cetera. And like, this is an enormous consequences for the climate movement. This is

enormous consequences of a lot of these. You know, Houston just decided, for example, the school board to fire a bunch of librarians and replace the school libraries with disciplinary centers for punishing kids. Right, these are things that like people in their local community need to be organizing against

and rising up and fighting. And so get together with your neighbors, do a reading group, learn about some of these issues, figure out who's already doing the work in your area, ask them how you can get involved and

plug in. Like there's no one size fits all answer, but that the one thing I will say is like you have to be in, not involved, in organizing your local community around something, then you should get involved, because we're never going to win these things unless we actually and you know, it's sometimes it's not the most glamorous work, it's not the most thrilling stuff, right, but like, unless we participate and fight, we're going to lose any semblance

of democratic life, and we're gonna have fully authoritarian society before.

the things that she believed in. You know that that Saturday Night, there's a tweet circulating with that video of Tim Robbins introducing her on Saturday Night Live and then her tearing up the photo of the Pope. You know, that was an act of courer. It's hard for people in this country to understand what that meant in Ireland at the time, in the early nineties, and I'm just

I just I marvel at the lack of courage. You know, the NBA players, for example, can't even get their act together to condemn Tom Gores for making hundreds of millions of dollars off black children by ending the right to hug their parents in jails right right. The level of removal of many prominent people in this country from the

extraordinary injustices of our time is really profoundly depressing. And I've been really encouraged by just watching her and thinking about how inspiring it was that she did that, and all the pain and sacrifices she made that accompanied it, So I think it's worth honoring that.

issues with these sort of objectivity it deserves.

like it's from at Equality Alec. The tweet is for each dollar stolen in shoplifting, there's at least five dollars in wage theft and one hundred dollars in tax evasion. Have you ever heard about a wage theft or tax evasion quote crime wave? What do you think this tells you about how reporters determine what is quote news and what is ignored and who benefits? And I think it's just the kind of shit we need to keep it in the front of our mind when we say what is crime exactly?

Zeitgeist on Instagram. We have Facebook fan page and a website Daily zeikeeist dot com where we post our episodes and our footnotes. We'll link off to the information that we talked about in today's episode, as well as a song that we think you might enjoy. Myles, what song do you think people know?