There are unprecedented rates of incarceration in America today, with hundreds of thousands of people being jailed annually. How does the cash bail system contribute to those pending trial but unable to meet bail? And what are the rights of those who are incarcerated? 

Alec Karakatsanis joins this episode to discuss what he calls “mass human caging” in America.

Karakatsanis is the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, a non-profit organization dedicated to groundbreaking systemic litigation and advocacy challenging pervasive injustices in the American criminal legal system.

Karakatsanis visited Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in late February 2019 as as part of its Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation Leadership through Mentorship Program. He 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.  

ABOUT THE HOSTS

Wang is a professor at Princeton University, appointed in neuroscience with affiliate appointments in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and the Center for Information Technology Policy. An alumnus of Caltech, where he received a B.S. with honors in physics, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Stanford University School of Medicine. He conducted postdoctoral research at Duke University Medical Center and at Bell Labs Lucent Technologies. He has also worked on science and education policy for the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. He is noted for his application of data analytics and poll aggregation to American politics. He is leading an effort at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project to build a 50-state data resource for legislative-quality citizen redistricting. His work to define a state-level legal theory to limit partisan gerrymandering recently won Common Cause’s Gerrymandering Standard Writing Contest. His neuroscience research concerns how the brain learns from sensory experience in early life, adulthood and autism.