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criminal justice system
How Does Copaganda Work and Why Is It Harmful?
Copaganda contributes to a cycle in which the root causes of our safety problems never get solved even though people in power constantly claim to be trying.
May 17, 2025
Copaganda is a specific type of propaganda in which the punishment bureaucracy and the powerful interests behind it influence how we think about crime and safety. I use the term “punishment bureaucracy” instead of “criminal justice system” in this book because it is a more accurate and less deceptive way to describe the constellation of public and private institutions that develop, enforce, and profit from criminal law. The government determines what things are considered a “crime” subject to punishment versus what things are permitted or tolerated even if they hurt people. Then, the government determines what kinds of punishments are appropriate for the conduct it prohibits. Across history and different societies, the definition of crime and how it should be punished has varied depending on who has power and what serves their interests, not an objective evaluation of what causes harm.
The powerful define crime to suit their interests, making some things legal and others punishable. They also decide how what is criminalized gets punished. Should the government execute or cage or whip people who break a law? Should the government mandate a public apology, permit survivors to initiate restorative processes, seize assets, require volunteer work, revoke a business or driver’s license, confine someone to their home, banish them? Should society show them love and give them help? Should society instead invest more in preventing certain harms from happening in the first place?
Having defined crime and punishment, the government also determines which crimes to enforce against which people. “Law enforcement” rarely responds to most violations of the law. It only enforces some criminal laws against some people some of the time.
The obsessive focus by news outlets on the punishment bureaucracy as a solution to interpersonal harm draws away resources from investment in the things that work better, along with a sense of urgency for those priorities.
These decisions, too, follow patterns of power, not safety. That is why U.S. police chose for many years to arrest more people for marijuana possession than for all “violent crime” combined. That is why police prioritize budgets for SWAT teams to search for drugs in poor communities over testing rape kits. That is why the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office responded to proposed county budget cuts by threatening to cut the divisions that handle white-collar crimes and sexual abuse. That is why about 90 percent of people prosecuted for crimes are very poor. That is why no senior figures were prosecuted for the 2008 financial crisis or the U.S. torture program after 9/11. That is why police tolerate widespread drug use in dorms at Ivy League universities. That is why most of the undercover police operations in hundreds of U.S. cities target disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and immigrant people instead of other police officers, prosecutors, real estate developers, fraternities with histories of drug distribution and rape, or corporate board rooms with histories of tax evasion, fraud, and insider trading. That is why a playground fight at a low-income school results in a child being taken away from their parents and jailed with a criminal record, while the same fight at a prep school may result in a call to parents for an early pickup that afternoon.
In an unequal society where a few have more money and power than the many, the punishment bureaucracy is a tool for preserving inequalities. It maintains the social order by using government violence to manage the unrest that comes from unfairness, desperation, and alienation, and it crushes organized opposition against the political system. These functions explain why the punishment bureaucracy expands during times of growing inequality and social agitation. Throughout history, those who are comfortable with how society looks tend to preserve and expand the punishment bureaucracy, even though—and largely because—it operates as an anti-democratic force. Those who have wanted to change certain aspects of our society—such as movements for workers, racial justice, women’s suffrage, economic equality, peace, ecological sustainability, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and so on—have tended throughout history to combat the size, power, and discretion of the punishment bureaucracy. Why? Because it is almost always wielded against them.
So, how does copaganda work? It has three main roles.
Job #1: Narrowing Our Understanding of Threat
The first job of copaganda is to narrow our conception of threat. Rather than the bigger threats to our safety caused by people with power, we narrow our conception to crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society. For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined—such as burglaries, retail theft, and robberies—costing an estimated $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. That’s over sixty times the wealth lost in all police-reported property crime. There are hundreds of thousands of known Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, damage to the nervous system, and death. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, about five times the number of homicides. At the same time, most sexual assaults, domestic violence crimes, and sex offenses against children go unreported, unrecorded, and ignored by the legal system. Punishment bureaucrats feed reporters stories that measure “safety” as any short-term increase or decrease in, say, official homicide or robbery rates, rather than by how many people died from lack of health care, how many children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by eviction or foreclosure, how many people couldn’t pay utility bills because of various white-collar crimes, how many thousands of illegal assaults police and jail guards committed, and so on. Sometimes the rates of various crimes go up and down, and we should all be concerned about any form of violence against any human being. But the first job of copaganda is getting us focused almost exclu- sively on a narrow range of the threats we face, mostly the officially-recorded crimes of poor people, rather than the large-scale devastation wrought by people with power and money.
Job #2: Manufacturing Fear
The second job of copaganda is to manufacture crises and panics about this narrow category of threats. After the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, for example, the news bombarded the public with a series of “crime waves” concerning various forms of crime committed by the poor even though government data showed that, despite some categories of police-reported crime rising and others falling at the beginning of the pandemic, overall property and violent crime continued to be at near-historic fifty-year lows the entire time. As a result of continual news-generated panics, nearly every year of this century, public opinion polls showed people believing that police-reported crime was rising, even when it was generally falling.
Copaganda leaves the public in a vague state of fear. It manufactures suspicion against poor people, immigrants, and racial minorities rather than, say, bankers, pharmaceutical executives, fraternity brothers, landlords, employers, and polluters. Copaganda also engenders fear of strangers while obscuring the oppressive forces that lead to interpersonal violence between acquaintances, friends, and family members. (Police themselves commit one-third of all stranger-homicides in the U.S., but these figures are generally excluded from reported crime rates.) This matters because when people are in a perpetual state of fear for their physical safety, they are more likely to support the punishment bureaucracy and authoritarian reactions against those they fear.
Job #3: Promoting Punishment as the Solution
The third job of copaganda is to convince the public to spend more money on the punishment bureaucracy by framing police, prosecutors, probation, parole, and prisons as effective solutions to interpersonal harm. Copaganda links safety to things the punishment bureaucracy does, while downplaying the connection between safety and the material, structural conditions of people’s lives. So, for example, a rise in homeless people sleeping in the street might be framed as an economic problem requiring more affordable housing, but copaganda frames it as “disorder” solvable with more arrests for trespassing. Instead of linking sexual assault to toxic masculinity or a lack of resources and vibrant social connections to escape high-risk situations, copaganda links it to an under-resourced punishment system. Like a media-induced Stockholm syndrome, copaganda sells us the illusion that the violent abuser is somehow the liberator, the protector, our best and only option.
If police, prosecutions, and prisons made us safe, we would be living in the safest society in world history. But, as I discuss later, greater investment in the punishment bureaucracy actually increases a number of social harms, including physical violence, sexual harm, disease, trauma, drug abuse, mental illness, isolation, and even, in the long term, police-recorded crime. Instead, overwhelming evidence supports addressing the controllable things that determine the levels of interpersonal harm in our society, including: poverty; lack of affordable housing; inadequate healthcare and mental wellness resources; nutrition; access to recreation and exercise; pollution; human and social connection; design of cities, buildings, and physical environments; and early-childhood education. Addressing root causes like these would lower police-reported crime and also prevent the other harms that flow from inequality that never make it into the legal system for punishment, including millions of avoidable deaths and unnecessary suffering that exceed the narrow category of harm that police record as “crime.”
The obsessive focus by news outlets on the punishment bureaucracy as a solution to interpersonal harm draws away resources from investment in the things that work better, along with a sense of urgency for those priorities. It also promotes the surveillance and repression of social movements that are trying to solve those root structural problems by fighting for a more equal and sustainable society. Copaganda thus contributes to a cycle in which the root causes of our safety problems never get solved even though people in power constantly claim to be trying.
As you read the examples collected in this book with the above three themes in mind, ask yourself: what kind of public is created by consuming such news? If we see one of these articles once, we may not notice anything odd, or we may shake our heads at how silly, uninformed, and nefarious it is. But if we see thousands of them over the course of years, and we hardly see anything else, we become different people. It is the ubiquity of copaganda that requires us to set up daily practices of individual and collective vigilance.
Copyright © 2025 by Alec Karakatsanis. This excerpt originally appeared in Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission and please note that it is not available for re-posting elsewhere.
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Trump Is Straining Our Mental Health Then Gutting Support Services
Despite the administration’s cuts, there appears to be surprising agreement among people with divergent political beliefs that it’s time to expand services for those who are struggling.
Apr 27, 2025
The United States has been in the throes of a mental health and overdose crisis so severe it has spanned five presidential administrations and been classified as an official state of emergency in three of them. No one knows exactly how this emergency will play out during the current Trumpian cocktail of uncertainty, fear, and cuts to social services, but charts of the recent turbulence of the stock market suggest a relevant visual: Imagine the nervous systems of millions of already struggling Americans, along with millions more who are being pushed to the limits of what they can handle, all experiencing deep emotional crashes, briefly recovering, only to collapse again into new lows. And while it might be tempting to think that many of us aren’t affected by the present gut-wrenching emotional tumult because we appear fine and don’t seem to care about what’s happening to the more desperate among us, our recent research suggests that people do care—including, perhaps, those you’d least expect to do so.
Last year brought a widely reported piece of news in mental health. Overdose fatalities in the United States declined substantially, a notable but qualified victory. As overdose deaths fell 9% from 2021 to 2023 for white Americans, such deaths increased 12% for people of other races, according to a Reuters analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Street drugs continue to kill more than 84,000 people in the United States annually, and overdoses remain the leading cause of death among Americans ages 18 to 44.
In such a devastating moment, in all corners of American society, people are in ever greater need of mental health services, just as funding for them is being slashed.
In other words, many young Americans and people of all ages attempt to numb difficult, even unbearable feelings, and sometimes that numbing is fatal. Depending on who you are, your preferred numbing agent might be wine, work, prescription pills, social media, street drugs, or something else entirely. But in the second age of Donald Trump, as well as long before him, all too many of us have been grappling with profound pain, whether from a sense of hopelessness about the future, oppression, trauma, grief, job loss, or general financial strain in ever more economically difficult times. Those among us who are not U.S. citizens are increasingly seized with the fear of being deported due to false, unknown, or unsubstantiated allegations and without due process. In addition to sowing terror, this has also been exacerbating an already widespread sense of loneliness, as people stay inside for fear of being detained.
Another source of despair is the urgent overseas humanitarian crisis over which noncitizens and legal permanent residents are now being seized, shackled, and imprisoned or disappeared for expressing moral protest. One (but not both) of the authors of this article has the protection of U.S. citizenship, although experts now question whether even citizenship will continue to provide protection, and so, for safety’s sake, we’re not naming that crisis or the widely shared sense of grief and powerlessness as men, women, and heartbreaking numbers of children die there. Students and people in all walks of life continue to take to the streets in protest, including the one of us who is a citizen.
Indeed, in such a devastating moment, in all corners of American society, people are in ever greater need of mental health services, just as funding for them is being slashed. May is Mental Health Awareness Month and so a ripe moment to take stock of the damage being done and to report that there appears to be surprising agreement among people with divergent political beliefs that it’s time to expand services for those who are struggling.
Dismantled?
In late January, the Trump White House issued a vague memo that put a temporary freeze on the disbursement of federal financial assistance. By early February, NBC News had reported that some health clinics were closing their doors. Then, in March, the Trump administration announced the cancellation of more than $11 billion in funding to deal with addiction, mental health, and related issues. A federal judge subsequently halted that cancellation of funds, saying such a sudden termination caused “direct and irreparable harm to public health.” The Trump administration requested a stay of the order, with plans to appeal.
By mid-April, around the same time that Elon Musk’s DOGE took over responsibility for posting federal grant opportunities for the public, Reuters published an extensive investigation on the subject. It drew on interviews with dozens of experts to conclude that funding cuts and associated layoffs were “dismantling the carefully constructed health infrastructure that drove the number of overdose deaths down by tens of thousands last year.”
In Philadelphia, where one of the authors of this article resides, the Inquirer reported that a forensic research lab that tests the nation’s illicit drug supply for new and harmful substances hadn’t received crucial funds from the federal government. That, in turn, meant the furloughing of staff and a growing backlog of untested samples. If you’ve followed news about the evolving nature of illicit and counterfeit drugs, you know that novel and dangerous molecules are continually turning up in unexpected places, whether the veterinary sedative xylazine or the more potent medetomidine found in batches of fentanyl, or as deadly levels of nitazenes in seemingly innocuous pills. Slowing or halting drug-testing is a dangerous proposition.
Meanwhile, a Philadelphia outreach program run by Unity Recovery was recently forced to shut down, while its workers who had offered services in addiction, nutrition, and other kinds of healthcare suddenly lost their jobs. At the time of this writing, the organization’s website features a red warning symbol and the message: “Due to federal funding cuts enacted on March 24, 2025, Unity Recovery has lost critical access to resources to provide peer support services.” It also notes that “information is changing rapidly”—a nod to the fact that a judge halted the cancellation of funds and no one now knows exactly how the pending cuts will (or won’t) unfold.
And while there is supposedly stark disagreement between the Trumpist and non-Trumpist halves of this country about whether such cuts should be taking place at all, extensive data from the purple state of Pennsylvania suggests there is far more agreement than anyone might have guessed.
“It Is in All Our Interests to Give Help and Support”
Over the past year, the two of us have worked on a research project that collected perspectives from thousands of Pennsylvanians about mental health, substance use, and the state’s criminal justice system. We also collected hundreds of surveys from Pennsylvanians who work in law enforcement and criminal justice. We guessed that such anonymous surveys would capture punitive viewpoints and a belief that people who use drugs should be put behind bars. And, yes, there was a bit of that, but to our surprise, on the whole, we found something quite different.
More than a quarter of Pennsylvanians said that, in recent years, they had become more sympathetic toward people who struggle with drugs or alcohol. A majority of the respondents identified stress and traumatic life events as a primary cause of problematic substance use. And most surprising of all, we found broad agreement on policy priorities across—yes, across—the political spectrum.
It’s notable that, in this purple state where the current president won more than 50% of the vote, there is majority support across the political spectrum for providing genuine assistance to people who need it.
Eighty-three percent of Pennsylvanians agreed that “addressing social problems such as homelessness, mental health, and substance use disorder” was a greater priority than “strengthening social order through more policing and greater enforcement of the laws.” That view was shared across political affiliations: 71% of respondents identifying as conservative agreed with it, as did 88% of those identifying as liberal.
Asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement, “It is in all our interests to give help and support to people who struggle with drugs and/or alcohol,” 68% of respondents identifying as conservative or very conservative agreed, as did 77% of liberal or very liberal respondents. Notably, there was majority support (61%) for increasing government spending for this cause. Even 54% of conservatives said they supported increasing spending to improve treatment and services for substance-use disorder.
We assumed that Americans who work in law enforcement and criminal justice would have more hardline views. Again, we were wrong. Compared with Pennsylvanians overall, over the past five years, those who work in the criminal justice system were—yes!—more likely to report feeling greater sympathy toward people who struggle with drugs or alcohol, and an overwhelming 70% of them believed that this society was obliged to provide them with treatment. Asked what services they believed could help prevent people struggling with substance use from becoming involved in the justice system, 71% said “more access to mental health treatment providers or services.”
Because much drug use in this country is criminalized, those who work in criminal justice are on the frontlines of our mental health crisis. These new findings suggest that, at least in Pennsylvania, justice system workers feel a responsibility to offer genuine help and see bolstering mental health services as the best way forward.
Of course, the opposite is happening. Yet it’s notable that, in this purple state where the current president won more than 50% of the vote, there is majority support across the political spectrum for providing genuine assistance to people who need it.
The ongoing axing of services will likely prove devastating. It leaves many feeling like there is nothing they can do. Yet, as individuals, count on one thing: We are not powerless (as we so often believe).
Looking Out for Others
When life feels scary and uncertain, as it increasingly does in the Trump era, many people respond by thinking a lot about what might happen in their world and trying to anticipate the future in order to make plans and gain at least some minimal sense of control. Both authors of this article—one of us a doctor, the other a writer—struggle with our ruminations on the state and direction of this country, which can lead us deeper into anxiety and isolation.
And while we probably can’t escape those fearful feelings (and probably shouldn’t try to), we can at least stay in touch with others instead of giving in to the common urge to withdraw. That isn’t easy, of course. Both of us find ourselves struggling to pick up the phone. But this is a time when picking up that phone couldn’t be more important. A time when so much of our world is endangered is distinctly a moment to put special effort into looking out for one another and regularly experiencing the energy that comes from human connection.
We also understand that many Americans are living on the edge. We often don’t know who among our neighbors and loved ones is wrestling with the question of whether life is worth living. (Suicide rates remain high for Americans generally and especially for those with drug and alcohol use disorders.) Right now, there is a dire need for better services, but even if every person had access to quality mental healthcare, our actions as community members would still matter. It’s sometimes possible to save the life of someone you care about just by telling them you care.
Each of us, including you, has a role to play in keeping all of us alive and safe as best we can in ever more difficult times.
From Crisis to Care
No one yet knows exactly how the Trump administration’s potentially staggering cuts to community healthcare and social services will unfold. But amid the chaos, people across this nation continue to do meaningful, lifesaving work.
The Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit outfit that seeks to prevent harms associated with drug use and drug criminalization, recently published a report entitled “From Crisis to Care.” It presents an intelligent roadmap for improving mental health and addressing substance use and homelessness, including investing in treatment options that are evidence-based and voluntary, as well as housing programs and community-based crisis response systems. These are anything but radical ideas. They’re grounded in research and can serve as a model for the future. Of course, funding and some political power will be necessary to accomplish such things, and that might sound farfetched in our current situation. But simple actions in the present make it more likely that such services will be launched in the future.
We can save a life by reaching out to friends and neighbors, and it’s no less important to recognize when we ourselves are struggling. Sometimes we worry about others without acknowledging that we, too, are on the edge. With that in mind, we’re writing the following words for you and every other reader but also for ourselves: When you’re struggling, contact someone you trust for support. By doing so, you’re also implicitly giving them permission to ask for help from you when they need it, and by giving and receiving help, you create a new pattern of reciprocity.
Such reciprocity has political significance. It fosters social cohesion, a precursor for coordinated action on a far larger sale.
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I Returned Home From Prison With Nothing; Here’s What Helped Me Rebuild
Programs like the Returning Citizens Stimulus don’t just improve lives—they reduce unnecessary incarceration and save public funds.
Apr 23, 2025
In April of 2020, one of us was navigating reentry during a global pandemic, while the other was working to implement the largest-ever cash assistance program specifically for people returning from incarceration. With the publication of groundbreaking research, five years later, we know that cash assistance has a positive impact on public safety. It’s time to scale this proven strategy to California’s recidivism challenges.
Karina:
I grew up in Los Angeles, where 1 in 3 children grow up in poverty. Despite a loving mother, I was placed in the foster care system at an early age—a system known to be a pipeline to incarceration. During my third pregnancy I was incarcerated, and I spent the next three years trying to figure out how I would support my family when I got out. With no savings and limited resources, I had no idea how I would get back on my feet.
Without any support for essentials like food, rent, or even a cellphone, the challenge of rebuilding a life is insurmountable.
The pandemic forced employers to go remote. I didn’t have access to a computer or money to buy one, and I didn’t have a clue on how I would afford housing. My kids have pulmonary issues, and I couldn’t see or live with them without risking exposure.
While incarcerated, I learned about the Returning Citizens Stimulus (RCS), a first-of-its-kind initiative launched by the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO). RCS offered financial support to people returning from incarceration. I received $2,750 in installments over two months after my release.
RCS cash made all the difference because getting and keeping a job right out of prison was nearly impossible. I applied to a job at a warehouse known for hiring justice-impacted people. I was fired on my day off because of my time in prison. For people like me this experience is commonplace. Without any support for essentials like food, rent, or even a cellphone, the challenge of rebuilding a life is insurmountable.
RCS covered my immediate needs, such as new clothes, transportation, and I could pay off my restitution. It even allowed me to take my kids out for a meal for the first time in three years. Today, I’m a member of CEO’s policy and advocacy team, where I’ve been able to use my story to advocate for direct cash assistance.
Sam:
In April 2020, when many justice-impacted people, like Karina, were locked out of government support, CEO—being one of the largest reentry services providers in the nation—conceived of and implemented RCS. The program delivered $24 million in direct cash payments to over 10,000 people returning from incarceration.
Research nonprofit MDRC’s most recent independent evaluation of the RCS program in Los Angeles and Alameda counties found that RCS reduced parole violations by nearly 15% for up to a year after enrollment with noteworthy statistical significance—meaning we can be almost certain it was the cash assistance that drove the outcomes. Parole is a costly and punitive system that accounts for 27% of all admissions to state and federal prisons and costs the U.S. over $10 billion annually.
Programs like RCS prove that a small investment at a critical time can lead to transformational change—for individuals, for families, and for entire communities.
Programs like RCS don’t just improve lives—they reduce unnecessary incarceration and save public funds. A short-term financial intervention had long-term impacts on reducing both violent and technical parole violations. It’s simple: When people have the resources to succeed, they don’t cycle back into the system.
Prop 36 is primed to roll back California’s progress in reducing its incarcerated population. More people are likely to go to prison, and less money will be directed towards reentry. The need to invest in solutions proven to halt the revolving door of incarceration have never been more necessary. California has already implemented direct cash assistance before and has a whole host of organizations ready to put it in action once again.
The governor and lawmakers must renew funding for Helping Justice-Involved Reenter Employment (HIRE). This program, set to sunset this fiscal year, has already distributed more than $500,000 in needs-based payments to justice-impacted people across the state, pairing cash support with pathways to good jobs.
Programs like RCS prove that a small investment at a critical time can lead to transformational change—for individuals, for families, and for entire communities.
Karina:
RCS offered me agency to determine my own career path. I could provide for my family while also pursuing a fulfilling job. As someone who was able to build a life through RCS, it is my responsibility to push for programs, like HIRE, that will have a lasting and significant impact on the future of my city, my state, and people returning home.
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