On Alec Karakatsanis

Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec, bio here on his site Civil Rights Corp.

Tweets

He's had a few good threads, so I'm keeping this as a tracker to remember his writing and work.

Nov 13, 2022 (src)

THREAD. A 70-year-old man has died in the downtown Houston jail because he couldn't pay $500 cash. No media outlet has deemed it important enough to tell the public about his death, but what happened is horrific and his story matters.

Robert Alfred Horn died on October 26. Sheriff officials and the news have chosen not to talk about his death to the public. The man is the 23rd person to die in the downtown Houston jail this year. What the news treats as urgent matters.

After his arrest, he was told that he could go free if he could get a $5,000 secured bond. The U.S. and the Philippines are the only two countries in the world to allow for-profit bond companies. But he had to pay a company $500 to secure the bond, and he couldn't. He died.

After our historic lawsuit, we ended the jailing of people charged with misdemeanors in that jail because they are poor. But prosecutors and judges in charge of felony cases have doubled down on cash. They use cash to determine who is free and who isn't: The News Media and Bail (via equalityalec.substack.com)

The consequences are dire. Using cash bail has led to humanitarian crisis at the jail, horrific abuse of pregnant women who can't get cash, wrongful convictions, and it increases crime in the future. Read about it from Eric Reinhart (@_Eric_Reinhart) and Krish Gundu (@kinsngops): Why Are In-Custody Deaths Surging at Houston’s Harris County Jail?

This is an area of scientific consensus and obvious policy. No one should be caged solely because they are poor, and we must do everything we can to maximize pretrial liberty so people can keep their jobs, their housing, and their families together.

If you wan to support people working on these issues with very limited resources, please support the amazing Texas Jail Project, which discovered the death, and without whom none of us would know about it.

THREAD. This weekend, the New York Times published misinformation it knew to be false. Because the stakes are so high, I try my best to explain what the paper did why it is so dangerous.

THREAD. Two Harvard professors published an academic article calling for 500,000 more armed cops, who they say will arrest 7.8 million more people per year. The article reveals alarming flaws in elite academia at a time of rising fascism. This is one of my most important posts.

Alec writes on Substack here, to get his writing in full if twitter is no longer accessible.

index tags: Twitter, Backup

category tags: Modern Authors