Alec Karakatsanis, founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, will discuss how the criminal punishment system in the United States has metastasized to levels unprecedented in the modern recorded history of the world. Using examples from his work challenging the money bail system and modern debtors’ prisons, his experience as a public defender, and his years of experience litigating cases of police, prosecutor, and judicial misconduct in federal courts across the country, Alec will discuss the current abolition and defund the police movements in the U.S, as well as the role of the media and public narrative in preserving the architecture of the punishment bureaucracy in the face of these social movements.