Copaganda by Alec Karakatsanis.

In the introduction to his most recent book, Copaganda, which was published yesterday, Alec Karakatsanis describes watching incarcerated parents in Flint, Michigan, press their faces against their prison windows, straining to read messages that their children have scrawled in chalk on the sidewalk below. Over the past twenty years, he writes, many jails have eliminated free in-person visits, and phone calls are often prohibitively expensive, so families resort to writing messages on the ground—things like “love u,” and “ur not alone,” and a drawing of a birthday cake decorated with candles. Karakatsanis describes watching jail employees with hoses wash some such messages away: “The vibrant chalk drawings,” he writes, “were reduced to splotches of muted color, like an abstract expressionist’s representation of bureaucratic cruelty.”

It’s all part of what Karakatsanis calls the “punishment bureaucracy”—the system by which the American political establishment devotes immense resources to policing the violation of certain laws by certain people. Karakatsanis writes that offenses that involve wealthier perpetrators—things like wage theft and corporate negligence—are rarely addressed with the brute force and cruelty meted upon poor people. “Punishment bureaucrats have produced a structure of mass human caging that is unlike anything that any other society has ever attempted,” he told me recently. “Let alone any other society that thinks of itself as a democracy.”