In this week's edition of Endnotes, we take a look at the publication process for Copaganda from Alec Karakatsanis, the founder of the Civil Rights Corps.
Here's how the book came together:
Alec Karakatsanis
“Copaganda came directly out of Civil Rights Corps’s work challenging mass incarceration in the U.S. I watched how police, prosecutors, punishment bureaucrats, and profiteers shaped the news about public safety and realized something important: the news affects what and who we’re afraid of. It also helps determine which solutions we conjure to meet those fears.”
Executive Director, New Press
“After publishing Alec’s first book, Usual Cruelty, I wanted to read everything he wrote. He shared an article about police body cameras that I thought we could turn into a small book. Then I found out he had a newsletter on a topic I’d never heard of: copaganda. The newsletter was an embarrassment of riches, and we worked with him to translate the ideas into a book.”
Tanya Coke
“Prison isn’t just incarceration, it’s ‘human caging.’ Our cash-for-release bail system is really just ‘poverty jailing.’ Alec is prolific—full of so many stories and examples that my challenge was to edit the 140,000-word manuscript he delivered down to a more manageable size.”
Maury Botton
“This project was a bit unusual in that the author had a specific idea about what he wanted for the final cover: a type-only design with the title and subtitle set to suggest a dictionary definition. Because the title is a concept that might be new to readers, the cover is meant to provide a definition by way of the subtitle.”
