This episode of We Don’t Have to Choose with Mary Moriarty features civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis.

Alec is the Founder and Executive Director of Civil Rights Corps. He has pioneered constitutional civil rights cases to challenge the size, power, profit, and everyday brutality of the punishment bureaucracy across the United States. Alec graduated from Yale College in 2005 with a degree in Ethics, Politics, & Economics and Harvard Law School in 2008, where he was a Supreme Court Chair of the Harvard Law Review. Before founding Civil Rights Corps, Alec was a civil rights lawyer and public defender with the Special Litigation Division of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia; a federal public defender in Alabama, representing impoverished people accused of federal crimes; and co-founder of the organization Equal Justice Under Law. His books, Copaganda and Unusual Cruelty unpack the ways the legal system re-entrenches many of the inequities it seeks to remedy.