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From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
In the United States today, one in every thirty-one adults is under some form of penal control, including one in eleven African American men. How did the “land of the free” become the home of the world’s largest prison system? Challenging the belief that America’s prison problem originated with the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society at the height of the civil rights era.
Johnson’s War on Poverty policies sought to foster equality and economic opportunity. But these initiatives were also rooted in widely shared assumptions about African Americans’ role in urban disorder, which prompted Johnson to call for a simultaneous War on Crime. The 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act empowered the national government to take a direct role in militarizing local police. Federal anticrime funding soon incentivized social service providers to ally with police departments, courts, and prisons. Under Richard Nixon and his successors, welfare programs fell by the wayside while investment in policing and punishment expanded. Anticipating future crime, policymakers urged states to build new prisons and introduced law enforcement measures into urban schools and public housing, turning neighborhoods into targets of police surveillance.
By the 1980s, crime control and incarceration dominated national responses to poverty and inequality. The initiatives of that decade were less a sharp departure than the full realization of the punitive transformation of urban policy implemented by Republicans and Democrats alike since the 1960s.
Johnson’s War on Poverty policies sought to foster equality and economic opportunity. But these initiatives were also rooted in widely shared assumptions about African Americans’ role in urban disorder, which prompted Johnson to call for a simultaneous War on Crime. The 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act empowered the national government to take a direct role in militarizing local police. Federal anticrime funding soon incentivized social service providers to ally with police departments, courts, and prisons. Under Richard Nixon and his successors, welfare programs fell by the wayside while investment in policing and punishment expanded. Anticipating future crime, policymakers urged states to build new prisons and introduced law enforcement measures into urban schools and public housing, turning neighborhoods into targets of police surveillance.
By the 1980s, crime control and incarceration dominated national responses to poverty and inequality. The initiatives of that decade were less a sharp departure than the full realization of the punitive transformation of urban policy implemented by Republicans and Democrats alike since the 1960s.
463 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 9, 2016
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About the author
Elizabeth Hinton
11 books150 followersElizabeth Hinton is Assistant Professor in the Department History and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the persistence of poverty and racial inequality in the 20th century United States, while her current scholarship considers the transformation of domestic social programs and urban policing after the Civil Rights Movement. She has written for the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, and Time. She also co-edited The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) with the late historian Manning Marable.
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May 15, 2021
The momentous year 1964 witnessed the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the launch of the federal initiatives collectively called the “War on Poverty.” The following year President LBJ sent to Congress the Voting Rights Act, which provided African Americans in the southern states the opportunity to participate in the electoral process as equal citizens. However, Johnson hoped that 1965 would be remembered not only for the triumph of the Civil Rights Movement, but also for the beginning of "a thorough, intelligent, and effective war against crime." On March 8, the president presented to Congress the Law Enforcement Assistance Act. Coming a week before the Voting Rights Act and after a summer of urban unrest in Harlem, Brooklyn, Rochester, Chicago, and Philadelphia in 1964, this punitive legislation offered a response to the threat of future disorder by establishing a direct role for the federal government in local police operations, court systems, and state prisons for the first time in American history.
"A new era of American law enforcement had begun, one that would soon shift the country’s progressive policy trajectory," writes Elizabeth Hinton. The federal government began to retreat from and eventually undercut many of the Great Society programs that are often heralded as the Johnson administration’s greatest achievements. Republican and Democratic policymakers alike instead mobilized to fight the War on Crime and, later, President Ronald Reagan’s more aggressive “War on Drugs.” According to the author, this long War on Crime would eventually produce the nowadays atrocity of mass incarceration in the United States, characterized by a rate of imprisonment far above all other industrialized nations and involving the systematic confinement of entire groups of citizens.
LBJ's Safe Streets Act of 1968 invested $400 million into the War on Crime. To promote the modernization of law enforcement and to help each state build its respective criminal justice apparatus, the legislation created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) to administer this funding, and the LEAA became the fastest-growing federal agency in the 1970s, its budget swelling from the $10 million Congress allotted to the War on Crime in 1965 to some $850 million by 1973. The states dedicated hundreds of billions of dollars more to criminal justice and law enforcement during the same years, stimulated by the programs national policymakers subsidized and designed. The result, points out Hinton, was a significant expansion of America’s "carceral state": "the police, sheriffs, and marshals responsible for law enforcement; the judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers that facilitate the judicial process; and the prison officials and probation and parole officers charged with handling convicted felons." The mission assigned to LEAA was to expand supervision and control in low-income urban communities. However, federal policymakers shared a set of (erroneous) assumptions about African Americans, poverty, and crime — although they never mentioned race explicitly, policymakers considered black urban poverty pathological, the product of individual and cultural "defficiencies." As Hinton argues, the seemingly neutral statistical and sociological “truth” of black criminality concealed the racist thinking that guided the strategies policymakers developed for the War on Crime, first in the 1960s, then through the 1970s and beyond.
In her book, Hinton also shows that contrary to popular opinion, it was not the Ronald Reagan administration that spearheaded the national crime-control programs. They began during the Civil Rights era with John F. Kennedy’s “total attack” on delinquency in 1961. The JFK administration’s antidelinquency programs were intended to provide low-income citizens in sixteen cities with counseling, job training, education, and other social welfare programs as a strategy to prevent youth crime. LBJ expanded Kennedy’s intervention on a national scale and reframed it as a “War on Poverty,” while also introducing more aggressive and exhaustive supervision in the black urban areas previously targeted by the JFK administration. Nixon introduced "draconian sentencing reforms", supporting the targeted deployment of aggressive local, state, and federal undercover police squads on the streets of American cities, and encouraging prison construction. As it became clear that white youth was also entering the justice system at alarming rates, though, Congress intervened to decriminalize certain offences that policymakers associated with white children and teenagers. Meanwhile, new legislation placed the stamp “potentially delinquent” on any urban youth of color who had family members with arrest records, attended public schools, lived in public housing, or received welfare benefits.
Thus, national priorities shifted from fighting black youth poverty to fighting black youth crime for the rest of the decade as policymakers introduced new patrol and surveillance measures in targeted urban communities. Not surprisingly, in the absence of programs that provided access to shelter, education, and employment, poverty and crime increased during the ensuing War on Crime. "That the crime control strategies federal policymakers developed proved to have the opposite impact in the cities and neighborhoods that they placed under siege is one of the most disturbing ironies in the history of American domestic policy," comments Hinton. As she argues, the War on Crime had made African-Americans vulnerable on two fronts: a struggle against one another and a struggle with the institutions and policies federal policymakers developed to fight crime. The essential strategies of the national law enforcement program — preemptive patrols that aimed to catch robberies in progress, juvenile delinquency policy that criminalized generations of black youth while decriminalizing their white counterparts, firearms sanctions that brought federal law enforcement authorities to the streets, Career Criminal court units that created an expedited criminal justice system for gang members, and security programs "that made housing projects resemble detention centers" — only hastened the trend toward internal violence and incarceration. While it may appear as though racial discrimination ended with the Civil Rights Movement, this is actually not the case. Waged over the second half of the 20th century, this long War on Crime has today positioned law enforcement agencies, criminal justice institutions, and jails as the primary "public programs" in many low-income, and especially African-American, communities across the United States.
Elizabeth Hinton's From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime raises awareness of an existing problem that should not be neglected. Her book is very well-written and highly important. Although I am not a U.S citizen, I found her work engaging, mostly because Bulgaria faces the very same domestic problem — but with low-income Roma communities.
"A new era of American law enforcement had begun, one that would soon shift the country’s progressive policy trajectory," writes Elizabeth Hinton. The federal government began to retreat from and eventually undercut many of the Great Society programs that are often heralded as the Johnson administration’s greatest achievements. Republican and Democratic policymakers alike instead mobilized to fight the War on Crime and, later, President Ronald Reagan’s more aggressive “War on Drugs.” According to the author, this long War on Crime would eventually produce the nowadays atrocity of mass incarceration in the United States, characterized by a rate of imprisonment far above all other industrialized nations and involving the systematic confinement of entire groups of citizens.
LBJ's Safe Streets Act of 1968 invested $400 million into the War on Crime. To promote the modernization of law enforcement and to help each state build its respective criminal justice apparatus, the legislation created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) to administer this funding, and the LEAA became the fastest-growing federal agency in the 1970s, its budget swelling from the $10 million Congress allotted to the War on Crime in 1965 to some $850 million by 1973. The states dedicated hundreds of billions of dollars more to criminal justice and law enforcement during the same years, stimulated by the programs national policymakers subsidized and designed. The result, points out Hinton, was a significant expansion of America’s "carceral state": "the police, sheriffs, and marshals responsible for law enforcement; the judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers that facilitate the judicial process; and the prison officials and probation and parole officers charged with handling convicted felons." The mission assigned to LEAA was to expand supervision and control in low-income urban communities. However, federal policymakers shared a set of (erroneous) assumptions about African Americans, poverty, and crime — although they never mentioned race explicitly, policymakers considered black urban poverty pathological, the product of individual and cultural "defficiencies." As Hinton argues, the seemingly neutral statistical and sociological “truth” of black criminality concealed the racist thinking that guided the strategies policymakers developed for the War on Crime, first in the 1960s, then through the 1970s and beyond.
In her book, Hinton also shows that contrary to popular opinion, it was not the Ronald Reagan administration that spearheaded the national crime-control programs. They began during the Civil Rights era with John F. Kennedy’s “total attack” on delinquency in 1961. The JFK administration’s antidelinquency programs were intended to provide low-income citizens in sixteen cities with counseling, job training, education, and other social welfare programs as a strategy to prevent youth crime. LBJ expanded Kennedy’s intervention on a national scale and reframed it as a “War on Poverty,” while also introducing more aggressive and exhaustive supervision in the black urban areas previously targeted by the JFK administration. Nixon introduced "draconian sentencing reforms", supporting the targeted deployment of aggressive local, state, and federal undercover police squads on the streets of American cities, and encouraging prison construction. As it became clear that white youth was also entering the justice system at alarming rates, though, Congress intervened to decriminalize certain offences that policymakers associated with white children and teenagers. Meanwhile, new legislation placed the stamp “potentially delinquent” on any urban youth of color who had family members with arrest records, attended public schools, lived in public housing, or received welfare benefits.
Thus, national priorities shifted from fighting black youth poverty to fighting black youth crime for the rest of the decade as policymakers introduced new patrol and surveillance measures in targeted urban communities. Not surprisingly, in the absence of programs that provided access to shelter, education, and employment, poverty and crime increased during the ensuing War on Crime. "That the crime control strategies federal policymakers developed proved to have the opposite impact in the cities and neighborhoods that they placed under siege is one of the most disturbing ironies in the history of American domestic policy," comments Hinton. As she argues, the War on Crime had made African-Americans vulnerable on two fronts: a struggle against one another and a struggle with the institutions and policies federal policymakers developed to fight crime. The essential strategies of the national law enforcement program — preemptive patrols that aimed to catch robberies in progress, juvenile delinquency policy that criminalized generations of black youth while decriminalizing their white counterparts, firearms sanctions that brought federal law enforcement authorities to the streets, Career Criminal court units that created an expedited criminal justice system for gang members, and security programs "that made housing projects resemble detention centers" — only hastened the trend toward internal violence and incarceration. While it may appear as though racial discrimination ended with the Civil Rights Movement, this is actually not the case. Waged over the second half of the 20th century, this long War on Crime has today positioned law enforcement agencies, criminal justice institutions, and jails as the primary "public programs" in many low-income, and especially African-American, communities across the United States.
Elizabeth Hinton's From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime raises awareness of an existing problem that should not be neglected. Her book is very well-written and highly important. Although I am not a U.S citizen, I found her work engaging, mostly because Bulgaria faces the very same domestic problem — but with low-income Roma communities.
May 22, 2016
If you liked the New Jim Crow, you will love this academic re-telling of that story. Hinton rejects the simple narrative that the war on crime came under Nixon and Reagan, but shows that it started creeping in with Kennedy and Johnson. The book shows how the poverty programs were coopted by law enforcement immediately. A must-read.
June 24, 2020
Professor Hinton has written an important work here.
There is a small window when White House policymakers looked at structural racism with Kennedy and the War on Poverty. They linked crime with economic inequality. But it quickly closed as racial bias set policy and things quickly morphed into punitive crime policy, especially after the riots in 1965.
LBJ began the War on Crime and supported legislation to militarize the police and more police surveillance. We move into Nixon who continued those policies and double-down on them. Carter tried to shift a bit more on economic policy on the one hand, but the other, he established more security tactics. Then Reagan and his War on Drugs, which really put the mass incarceration on the fast track. All of this failed, because as a nation, we have not focused on uprooted structural racism and bias that would lead to supporting African-Americans. For example, why set up job training if there are no jobs to go to?
Hinton writes, "Put bluntly, due to its own shared set of assumptions about race and its unwillingness to disrupt the racial hierarchies that have defined the social, political, and economic relations of the United States historically, the bipartisan consensus that launched the punitive intervention did not believe that African Americans were capable of governing themselves." (337)
This book is about policy, so set your reading expectations accordingly, but truly, it is first-rate history. Highly recommend.
There is a small window when White House policymakers looked at structural racism with Kennedy and the War on Poverty. They linked crime with economic inequality. But it quickly closed as racial bias set policy and things quickly morphed into punitive crime policy, especially after the riots in 1965.
LBJ began the War on Crime and supported legislation to militarize the police and more police surveillance. We move into Nixon who continued those policies and double-down on them. Carter tried to shift a bit more on economic policy on the one hand, but the other, he established more security tactics. Then Reagan and his War on Drugs, which really put the mass incarceration on the fast track. All of this failed, because as a nation, we have not focused on uprooted structural racism and bias that would lead to supporting African-Americans. For example, why set up job training if there are no jobs to go to?
Hinton writes, "Put bluntly, due to its own shared set of assumptions about race and its unwillingness to disrupt the racial hierarchies that have defined the social, political, and economic relations of the United States historically, the bipartisan consensus that launched the punitive intervention did not believe that African Americans were capable of governing themselves." (337)
This book is about policy, so set your reading expectations accordingly, but truly, it is first-rate history. Highly recommend.
August 30, 2025
"Behind a delinquent child lies a delinquent parent," Congressman James Scheuer D-NY, 1965 (pg 61)
"There is no American right to loot stores, or to burn buildings, or to fire rifles from rooftops. That is a crime." President Johnson, 1967, in response to Detroit and Newark race riots (pg 107)
This was an explanation on the federal government's intervention on the overarching war on crime. The time frames of this narrative are from the 1960s through the 1980s and their respective presidents. There has been lots of time, resources, and efforts to combat the escalation of crime that sprang up in major cities. The narrative correlates poverty with crime but attributes increased arrests, incarceration, and police intervention to racism.
America underwent what has been labeled as the Great Migration: this was the mass migration and repopulation of black Southern families up into Northern urban cities: Detroit, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc. As blacks moved into the inner cities due to low-rent affordable housing, these areas became riddled with crime. The genesis of tackling this endeavor started from the New Frontier social program during the Kennedy administration. This was seen in the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act of 1961 that sought to address the problems of "youth unemployment, poor housing, poor health, inadequate education, and the alienation of lower-class communities and neighborhoods" (pg 32).
When Lyndon Johnson assumed office in 1963, the "total attack" on delinquency waged by Kennedy quickly became expanded and recast as a War on Poverty. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, Office of Economic Opportunity continued funding, grants, and millions of aid, assistance, amd welfare into the inner city. This took the form of schooling, healthcare, housing, etc., all that sprung forth from Johnson's Great Society program.
But as Johnson was marred by race riots set against his 1964-5 Civil Rights initiatives, legislation created the Office of Law Enforcement Assistant (OLEA) and the War on Crime was enacted. Johnson and various social research
task forces concluded the disproportionate rate of black American poverty resulted from "the breakdown of the Negro family structure." Without a national policy to foster two-parent households, Johnson believed, "the circle of despair and deprivation" in black urban America would never break (pgs 60-1).
As race riots raged on and vurned American cities in the mid- to late-1960s, Johnson's task force acknowledged the socioeconomic conditions that precipitated the violence, it ultimately pointed to "demographic characteristics" as the chief cause, emphasizing divorce rates, single-parent households, illegitimacy, and delinquency (pg 77) and the dysfunctional family life caused crime (pg 116).
Richard Nixon came into office 1969 and continued the War on Crime. By 1970, his New Federalism policy was intended to provide states a general framework to help steer their plans for local law enforcement rather than mandating specific programs. During the Nixon administration and continued under President Gerald Ford, the "Long-Range Master Plan" Crime Commission, Kerner Commission, and National Advisory Committee restructred & enacted heavy-handed policing strategies, longer sentencing for repeat offenders (pg 146-79). This also reorganized the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons moving away from rehabilitation to deterring the 144% increase in crime that accumulated between 1960 to 1974. (pg 223). This era saw the Vietnamization of the criminal justice system: more men, more equipment, more incursions, and swift & sure punishment to combat inner city crime.
The Carter administration, 1977 to 1981, started an Urban Anti-Crime program that would increase earlier crime war programs, improving security and surveillance. Although Carter's attention to social conditions seemed like a return to liberal approaches to domestic social programs, his urban policies instead built the way for future Republican approaches (pg 276-306).
Beginning in 1981, the Reagan administration transformed the ongoing war on crime to the War on Drugs. Reagan implemented some of the most draconian legislative protocols of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford regarding domestic surveillance, the criminal code, and mandatory minimum sentences. The addition of the war on drugs & youth gangs drove the extension of military power into domestic law enforcement was guided by the newly voted legislation, the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Congress in 1982 authorized the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act that partnered the Department of Defense with customs, law enforcement, and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to combat the drug epidemic (pg 307-32).
There was a lot to absorb from the narrative. There was a lot of research, data points, and information presented on policing & law enforcement. My only problem was the author drove the victim narrative: there was no mention of comparative crime statistics and no acknowledgement of the concept of commit a crime, do the time. The author only presented arrests & incarceration of black Americans and black youth as unjustified and unwarranted. She also used vague language blaming the government and police for targeting and incarcerating black Americans because they are poor. She inferred black youth are beaten by police, arrested, convicted & sentenced because America is racist.
There was no acknowledgement that police don't go around arresting random people—there is a crime in progress, a crime that was committed, or there is infringement on somebody's civil liberties in order to justify an arrest. Nor was there acknowledgement of bad behavior and lack of community accountability & investment that takes away from the rest of the successful and law abiding community. Don't give the police a reason to police.
The underlying thesis is that one in eleven African American men are in prison because they were born a certain skin color, not because a crime was committed.
"There is no American right to loot stores, or to burn buildings, or to fire rifles from rooftops. That is a crime." President Johnson, 1967, in response to Detroit and Newark race riots (pg 107)
This was an explanation on the federal government's intervention on the overarching war on crime. The time frames of this narrative are from the 1960s through the 1980s and their respective presidents. There has been lots of time, resources, and efforts to combat the escalation of crime that sprang up in major cities. The narrative correlates poverty with crime but attributes increased arrests, incarceration, and police intervention to racism.
America underwent what has been labeled as the Great Migration: this was the mass migration and repopulation of black Southern families up into Northern urban cities: Detroit, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc. As blacks moved into the inner cities due to low-rent affordable housing, these areas became riddled with crime. The genesis of tackling this endeavor started from the New Frontier social program during the Kennedy administration. This was seen in the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act of 1961 that sought to address the problems of "youth unemployment, poor housing, poor health, inadequate education, and the alienation of lower-class communities and neighborhoods" (pg 32).
When Lyndon Johnson assumed office in 1963, the "total attack" on delinquency waged by Kennedy quickly became expanded and recast as a War on Poverty. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, Office of Economic Opportunity continued funding, grants, and millions of aid, assistance, amd welfare into the inner city. This took the form of schooling, healthcare, housing, etc., all that sprung forth from Johnson's Great Society program.
But as Johnson was marred by race riots set against his 1964-5 Civil Rights initiatives, legislation created the Office of Law Enforcement Assistant (OLEA) and the War on Crime was enacted. Johnson and various social research
task forces concluded the disproportionate rate of black American poverty resulted from "the breakdown of the Negro family structure." Without a national policy to foster two-parent households, Johnson believed, "the circle of despair and deprivation" in black urban America would never break (pgs 60-1).
As race riots raged on and vurned American cities in the mid- to late-1960s, Johnson's task force acknowledged the socioeconomic conditions that precipitated the violence, it ultimately pointed to "demographic characteristics" as the chief cause, emphasizing divorce rates, single-parent households, illegitimacy, and delinquency (pg 77) and the dysfunctional family life caused crime (pg 116).
Richard Nixon came into office 1969 and continued the War on Crime. By 1970, his New Federalism policy was intended to provide states a general framework to help steer their plans for local law enforcement rather than mandating specific programs. During the Nixon administration and continued under President Gerald Ford, the "Long-Range Master Plan" Crime Commission, Kerner Commission, and National Advisory Committee restructred & enacted heavy-handed policing strategies, longer sentencing for repeat offenders (pg 146-79). This also reorganized the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons moving away from rehabilitation to deterring the 144% increase in crime that accumulated between 1960 to 1974. (pg 223). This era saw the Vietnamization of the criminal justice system: more men, more equipment, more incursions, and swift & sure punishment to combat inner city crime.
The Carter administration, 1977 to 1981, started an Urban Anti-Crime program that would increase earlier crime war programs, improving security and surveillance. Although Carter's attention to social conditions seemed like a return to liberal approaches to domestic social programs, his urban policies instead built the way for future Republican approaches (pg 276-306).
Beginning in 1981, the Reagan administration transformed the ongoing war on crime to the War on Drugs. Reagan implemented some of the most draconian legislative protocols of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford regarding domestic surveillance, the criminal code, and mandatory minimum sentences. The addition of the war on drugs & youth gangs drove the extension of military power into domestic law enforcement was guided by the newly voted legislation, the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Congress in 1982 authorized the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act that partnered the Department of Defense with customs, law enforcement, and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to combat the drug epidemic (pg 307-32).
There was a lot to absorb from the narrative. There was a lot of research, data points, and information presented on policing & law enforcement. My only problem was the author drove the victim narrative: there was no mention of comparative crime statistics and no acknowledgement of the concept of commit a crime, do the time. The author only presented arrests & incarceration of black Americans and black youth as unjustified and unwarranted. She also used vague language blaming the government and police for targeting and incarcerating black Americans because they are poor. She inferred black youth are beaten by police, arrested, convicted & sentenced because America is racist.
There was no acknowledgement that police don't go around arresting random people—there is a crime in progress, a crime that was committed, or there is infringement on somebody's civil liberties in order to justify an arrest. Nor was there acknowledgement of bad behavior and lack of community accountability & investment that takes away from the rest of the successful and law abiding community. Don't give the police a reason to police.
The underlying thesis is that one in eleven African American men are in prison because they were born a certain skin color, not because a crime was committed.
June 28, 2017
If you are only going to read one book on mass incarceration and inequality, you should read The New Jim Crow by Michele Alexander. However, if you would like to read additional books on the subject, I definitely recommend this one. Hinton's book goes back farther in time to recount the history of of the war on poverty, masked as the war on crime. While the beginning of the book did not grab me right away, I was really appreciative of Hinton's focus on the academic liberal's depiction of black people. Just as in Dunieier's book Ghetto, Hinton includes an impressive explanation of some of the most important insights from academics that served to both inform policy at the political level and inform ideology at the societal level. In addition, she tied what was going on in society at the time to the policies that were being written and enforced as well as the myriad academic books, papers, and reports that were also being compiled. For example, she did an incredible job of showing how attitudes and policies led to the famous Watts riots of 1965.
This book can provide the reader with an extremely in depth look at the very complex interactions between the citizens, the justice system, and the political system that at times tried to help and other times found creative and devastating ways to control America's most vulnerable citizens.
This book can provide the reader with an extremely in depth look at the very complex interactions between the citizens, the justice system, and the political system that at times tried to help and other times found creative and devastating ways to control America's most vulnerable citizens.
December 21, 2018
This comprehensive book explores how the Civil Rights Era directly facilitated the modern carceral state, through the initiatives of Republicans and Democrats alike. At a recent remove, our prison populations matched the complexion of our country. But images of cities being "torn apart" by non-white agitators and the specter of non-white people with power, demanding rights shook genteel, suburban America to the core. The flip side of the "Great Society"--of dubious lasting success--was Law and Order, a regime that continues to thrive and enforce racial injustices that seem almost Apartheid-esque in their disproportionality.
This book talks a lot about what was happening on the ground, in individual precincts and cities, which I found less useful than its more macroscopic takes. But all around it was interesting, well-written, and a cautionary tale to progressives (very much including myself) who can be disinterested the tiresome but politically influential class and race anxieties of white people, never really activated more so than when minorities demand equality.
This book talks a lot about what was happening on the ground, in individual precincts and cities, which I found less useful than its more macroscopic takes. But all around it was interesting, well-written, and a cautionary tale to progressives (very much including myself) who can be disinterested the tiresome but politically influential class and race anxieties of white people, never really activated more so than when minorities demand equality.
June 25, 2016
I wanted to like this book more than I actually did like it. This left me largely flat. I think that’s largely because of the focus: academic tomes that focus heavily on the bureaucratic process of Washington DC and legislative back-and-forth are never my favorites. Yeah, it’s a legitimate way of exploring topics, but it also feels lifeless. Some of my favorite parts here are when Hinton gets into specific examples, such as police programs in Detroit or LA and the impact that had on communities. I could’ve used more of that to provide a sense of life. Also, I think the book at times led too strongly with opinion and the author’s own POV. I have no problem with an author having a POV – heck, I have a problem with an author lacking one – but if you lead too strongly with it, you can get detached from the evidence and overreach beyond your point. Example: she argues that crime stats had little to do with crime. That’s an intriguing point – but it needs to be elaborated a helluva more than is done. Also, it seems like no matter what happens and what the government tries to do, it’s bad and wrong and just makes the situation worse. There are times you have a program in place and it’s terrible. So the program is moved away from and a different approach tried – and it turns out that’s even worse than the terrible one. It gets a little confusing – wait, we’re going away from the bad approach, and that’s bad also? At times I felt myself wondering: well, what should be done? The only sense I got here is that everything stinks.
This book looks at how we went from LBJ’s War on Poverty to Ronald Reagan’s War on Crime, and largely argues that there wasn’t any big break – that all government programs led up to Reagan. The main theme here is continuity. From the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 and the Safe Streets Act of 1968, the federal government used law enforcement to try to control low income urban areas and centralize law enforcement. We had 185,000 in federal jails from 1865-1965 and then 251,107 from 1965-1985. And it’s now 2.2 million – 59% of whom are minorities.
She begins with JFK. Civil rights alone weren’t enough to overcome a legacy of historical inequality. He also focused on anti-deliquiency measures. There were notions of black cultural pathology (Hinton repeatedly asserts that these were based on racist assumptions. Asserts like this happen throughout the book – apparently, the truths of the assertions are self-evident). The War on Poverty had a fear of urban disorder. Federal programs ignored existing local efforts. Education was to expose kids to the norms of dominant society. LBJ expands JFK’s efforts against deliquincy. But as early as 1965, LBJ used the phrase war on crime and called for law and order.
The Watts Riot revealed the need for jobs and the stigma of poverty and segregation. Welfare agencies felt that it showed the cultural deficiencies of black communities. This is when LEAA passed. It was the start of the militarization of the police. Now you want police to actively seek out criminals in poor urban areas (re: black areas). Give cops more power over social programs. She argues that beneath the Kerner Commission’s liberal rhetoric, it also supported a war on crime because it assumed a pathology of poverty and crime.
Nixon pushes the most coercive pars of the Great Society programs. The War on Crime was used to target segregated urban areas. Nixon was all about law and order. LEAA became a den of corruption and patronage. By 1970, the first mandatory minimum sentences came about. The feds finance local cops more and more. The Bureau of Prisons created a long range plan that helped guarantee more people would be put in jails. Incarceration rates had little to do with crime, Hinton asserted.
There was increased pessimism by government leaders. People were fatalistic about black family pathology. They felt government programs couldn’t do any good. This led to more emphasis upon the police. Police began reigns of terror like the STRESS program in Detroit. A community backlash led to Mayor Coleman Young, who criticized STRESS, but still wanted federal money to come in for it. You had situations where blacks would be criminalized for going to McDonalds late at night. By the mid-1970s, federal programs would classify black youths as deliquent even before they did anything. Then crime stats would be produced to back it up. The top indicator of delinquency was being jailed or detained – and the policies just jailed and detained more and more. People felt nothing could be done and nothing worked – so do this.
Carter saw crime as a problem caused by poverty. He wanted to clean up the ghettos. He felt only the federal government could tackle the problem. But his policies didn’t match his rhetoric. He laid the groundwork for privitization and the war on drugs. There was bureaucratic opposition to his plans. He had a limited view of community participation. This chapter I felt was weak because it sounded like Carter was supporting a lot of what Hinton liked, but it’s terrible because it isn’t exactly what Hinton wants.
Finally, Reagan became president. Law enforcement became more centralized. Jail populations skyrocketed. The War on Drugs happened, which included cops skimming off the top. LA had its CRASH program, where the LAPD became a gang itself.
The War on Crime is all about social control, which is how we got to Ferguson. I like the book’s main point more than I liked the bok.
This book looks at how we went from LBJ’s War on Poverty to Ronald Reagan’s War on Crime, and largely argues that there wasn’t any big break – that all government programs led up to Reagan. The main theme here is continuity. From the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 and the Safe Streets Act of 1968, the federal government used law enforcement to try to control low income urban areas and centralize law enforcement. We had 185,000 in federal jails from 1865-1965 and then 251,107 from 1965-1985. And it’s now 2.2 million – 59% of whom are minorities.
She begins with JFK. Civil rights alone weren’t enough to overcome a legacy of historical inequality. He also focused on anti-deliquiency measures. There were notions of black cultural pathology (Hinton repeatedly asserts that these were based on racist assumptions. Asserts like this happen throughout the book – apparently, the truths of the assertions are self-evident). The War on Poverty had a fear of urban disorder. Federal programs ignored existing local efforts. Education was to expose kids to the norms of dominant society. LBJ expands JFK’s efforts against deliquincy. But as early as 1965, LBJ used the phrase war on crime and called for law and order.
The Watts Riot revealed the need for jobs and the stigma of poverty and segregation. Welfare agencies felt that it showed the cultural deficiencies of black communities. This is when LEAA passed. It was the start of the militarization of the police. Now you want police to actively seek out criminals in poor urban areas (re: black areas). Give cops more power over social programs. She argues that beneath the Kerner Commission’s liberal rhetoric, it also supported a war on crime because it assumed a pathology of poverty and crime.
Nixon pushes the most coercive pars of the Great Society programs. The War on Crime was used to target segregated urban areas. Nixon was all about law and order. LEAA became a den of corruption and patronage. By 1970, the first mandatory minimum sentences came about. The feds finance local cops more and more. The Bureau of Prisons created a long range plan that helped guarantee more people would be put in jails. Incarceration rates had little to do with crime, Hinton asserted.
There was increased pessimism by government leaders. People were fatalistic about black family pathology. They felt government programs couldn’t do any good. This led to more emphasis upon the police. Police began reigns of terror like the STRESS program in Detroit. A community backlash led to Mayor Coleman Young, who criticized STRESS, but still wanted federal money to come in for it. You had situations where blacks would be criminalized for going to McDonalds late at night. By the mid-1970s, federal programs would classify black youths as deliquent even before they did anything. Then crime stats would be produced to back it up. The top indicator of delinquency was being jailed or detained – and the policies just jailed and detained more and more. People felt nothing could be done and nothing worked – so do this.
Carter saw crime as a problem caused by poverty. He wanted to clean up the ghettos. He felt only the federal government could tackle the problem. But his policies didn’t match his rhetoric. He laid the groundwork for privitization and the war on drugs. There was bureaucratic opposition to his plans. He had a limited view of community participation. This chapter I felt was weak because it sounded like Carter was supporting a lot of what Hinton liked, but it’s terrible because it isn’t exactly what Hinton wants.
Finally, Reagan became president. Law enforcement became more centralized. Jail populations skyrocketed. The War on Drugs happened, which included cops skimming off the top. LA had its CRASH program, where the LAPD became a gang itself.
The War on Crime is all about social control, which is how we got to Ferguson. I like the book’s main point more than I liked the bok.
January 21, 2021
takeaway theme:
we’re prone to forget.
hence, we often repeat.
we often like to talk
yet we’re blessed with hands & feet.
many say that actions are much louder than words...
but what if we first need quiet, not noise,
for the cries to be heard?
let our ears listen, hands ready with a pen
to know where we’re heading
we must know where we’ve been.
we’re prone to forget.
hence, we often repeat.
we often like to talk
yet we’re blessed with hands & feet.
many say that actions are much louder than words...
but what if we first need quiet, not noise,
for the cries to be heard?
let our ears listen, hands ready with a pen
to know where we’re heading
we must know where we’ve been.
September 23, 2018
This was an exceptionally well researched/documented book and an interesting argument that nonetheless has some problems. Here's the basic argument: Hinton says that the roots of the War on Crime/Drugs can actually be found in Great Society/War on Poverty discourses/policies about delinquency, the causes of poverty/crime, and race. She argues that WoP advocates saw problems in black society as coming largely from "pathologies" born of racism, family breakdown/structure (think Moynihan report) and culture. She claims that they overlooked the systemic factors of residential segregation, job loss/denial, poor education, and police abuse, in large part because they didn't want to tackle or face up to these problems. Thus, early WoP measures featured increased surveillance of the black community, which meant more exposure to police/the state in general.
These discourses/frameworks carried over as the WoP shifted to the WoC and then WoD in the late 1960s/70s/80s. The mid-60s race riots further convinced policymakers that black pathology was the main cause of poverty and crime. Nixon and his aides ran with this idea, cutting back on the WoP and pushing more money into policing and incarceration. She goes into the details of Carter and RR's changes to this system, but it was largely a downward spiral into mass incarceration after that point. She shows how by the 1970s the crime discourse among experts like James Q Wilson was focused on finding ways to get likely African-American criminals off the streets, even for minor crimes, to pre-empt what was expected to be a career of crime. This is a key idea in mass incarceration ideological edifice, and I hadn't really thought of it until I listened to Hinton. Think about 3 strikes laws, disproportionate sentencing for things like illegal handguns or crack v cocaine, and the overwhelming targeting of black communities: they all fit into this framework.
I'm usually the last guy to bring up Foucault, but I actually found this to be a useful application of his ideas from Discipline and Punish. One of the book's key insights is that government aid/outreach means surveillance or knowledge, especially when that outreach is done by the police, as it was increasingly during the WoC. This means that the likelihood of a black person breaking the law and getting caught is vastly higher, which means a criminal record, which means more surveillance and likely jail time. The situation in wealthier white communities was the opposite: relatively low surveillance and interference, especially when politically connected white communities complained. Thus we should expect that wherever police resources are directed, those areas will inherently appear more criminal, and to some extent a self-perpetuating cycle can ensue (think New Jim Crow). This is an important and timely lesson.
Nonetheless, there are points to be criticized here. Ultimately, I didn't think she strongly proved her point about the roots of the WoC in the WoP. She kind of glossed over the positive gains and long legacies of those programs, not of all which were rooted in understandings of black pathology. Moreover, she seems unwilling to examine how certain cultural factors may contribute to crime, delinquency, etc, in a community. This is largely a problem of class and family structure, as sociologists in books like Robert Putnam's Our Kids point out. White communities falling into poverty see the same cultural/social problems arising as black communities, showing that these are not pathologies of race but of class, opportunity, despair and the culture that can form from these factors. This is sticky territory, but just because Moynihan was wrong about matriarchal black family structure being the root of crime and poverty doesn't mean we can't fruitfully explore these sociological and cultural factors. Lastly, something I often say about books like this is that the argument and its political implications are strong and clear enough that the writer can write in an unbiased, level tone and get the message across. Hinton, for the most part, doesn't do this, thus decreasing the likelihood of her vital research reaching less sympathetic ears (ie, the ears that need to hear it). She would have been better off letting the strength of her research speak for itself than to constantly insert jabs and opinions.
This is a dense book, with a lot of discussion of agencies, policymaking, and law. I listened to it, but I probably missed a lot. You really have to focus. Nonetheless, if you have read texts like New Jim Crow and want to go a little deeper on mass incarceration type stuff, this is a strong and interesting book.
These discourses/frameworks carried over as the WoP shifted to the WoC and then WoD in the late 1960s/70s/80s. The mid-60s race riots further convinced policymakers that black pathology was the main cause of poverty and crime. Nixon and his aides ran with this idea, cutting back on the WoP and pushing more money into policing and incarceration. She goes into the details of Carter and RR's changes to this system, but it was largely a downward spiral into mass incarceration after that point. She shows how by the 1970s the crime discourse among experts like James Q Wilson was focused on finding ways to get likely African-American criminals off the streets, even for minor crimes, to pre-empt what was expected to be a career of crime. This is a key idea in mass incarceration ideological edifice, and I hadn't really thought of it until I listened to Hinton. Think about 3 strikes laws, disproportionate sentencing for things like illegal handguns or crack v cocaine, and the overwhelming targeting of black communities: they all fit into this framework.
I'm usually the last guy to bring up Foucault, but I actually found this to be a useful application of his ideas from Discipline and Punish. One of the book's key insights is that government aid/outreach means surveillance or knowledge, especially when that outreach is done by the police, as it was increasingly during the WoC. This means that the likelihood of a black person breaking the law and getting caught is vastly higher, which means a criminal record, which means more surveillance and likely jail time. The situation in wealthier white communities was the opposite: relatively low surveillance and interference, especially when politically connected white communities complained. Thus we should expect that wherever police resources are directed, those areas will inherently appear more criminal, and to some extent a self-perpetuating cycle can ensue (think New Jim Crow). This is an important and timely lesson.
Nonetheless, there are points to be criticized here. Ultimately, I didn't think she strongly proved her point about the roots of the WoC in the WoP. She kind of glossed over the positive gains and long legacies of those programs, not of all which were rooted in understandings of black pathology. Moreover, she seems unwilling to examine how certain cultural factors may contribute to crime, delinquency, etc, in a community. This is largely a problem of class and family structure, as sociologists in books like Robert Putnam's Our Kids point out. White communities falling into poverty see the same cultural/social problems arising as black communities, showing that these are not pathologies of race but of class, opportunity, despair and the culture that can form from these factors. This is sticky territory, but just because Moynihan was wrong about matriarchal black family structure being the root of crime and poverty doesn't mean we can't fruitfully explore these sociological and cultural factors. Lastly, something I often say about books like this is that the argument and its political implications are strong and clear enough that the writer can write in an unbiased, level tone and get the message across. Hinton, for the most part, doesn't do this, thus decreasing the likelihood of her vital research reaching less sympathetic ears (ie, the ears that need to hear it). She would have been better off letting the strength of her research speak for itself than to constantly insert jabs and opinions.
This is a dense book, with a lot of discussion of agencies, policymaking, and law. I listened to it, but I probably missed a lot. You really have to focus. Nonetheless, if you have read texts like New Jim Crow and want to go a little deeper on mass incarceration type stuff, this is a strong and interesting book.
June 6, 2019
For the research purposes (and why I read it), this packs a lot of information and food for thought. Hinton proves how America's justice system has been formed on racism and inequality and still is. However, it is not particularly easy to read, either in subject or writing wise. It feels very heavy in many instances and you need to have some background knowledge of United States' history from the Second World War to the beginning of 21st century. Luckily I had an extensive course on American history after World Wars as background because otherwise I would have been lost. Do I recommend to read it? Surely, if you are ready for a very academical and dry text. It carries a very important message and it isn't an easy read, but a very necessary read.
June 2, 2017
Elizabeth Hinton packs a great deal of information into this academic analysis of criminal justice policies and programs implemented by administrations from Kennedy to Reagan, with special emphasis on how Johnson's War on Poverty became subsumed by the War on Crime.
This is an insightful examination of deeply flawed policies, of a lack of imagination at the highest levels of government, of a reluctance to grapple with the underlying socioeconomic causes of crime, and of the consequent racist criminalization of young African American men as urban Black communities were subjected to greater surveillance and became increasingly heavily policed.
Instead of dealing with substandard housing, unemployment, poverty, urban segregation, and racism, successive administrations chose to pursue policies that have resulted in the mass incarceration of Black men. Hinton's book provides essential background and context for anyone seeking to understand how the United States came to lock up so many of its young Black citizens.
This is an insightful examination of deeply flawed policies, of a lack of imagination at the highest levels of government, of a reluctance to grapple with the underlying socioeconomic causes of crime, and of the consequent racist criminalization of young African American men as urban Black communities were subjected to greater surveillance and became increasingly heavily policed.
Instead of dealing with substandard housing, unemployment, poverty, urban segregation, and racism, successive administrations chose to pursue policies that have resulted in the mass incarceration of Black men. Hinton's book provides essential background and context for anyone seeking to understand how the United States came to lock up so many of its young Black citizens.
February 7, 2017
A very interesting and needed book about the expansion of state power and state sanctioned violence. The book has some shortcomings and blind spots, as pointed out in this review in Reason magazine (https://reason.com/archives/2017/01/2...). Sadly the article is unfair and written by an informed, yet shallow mind. See the conclusion of Thaddeus Russell of Reason magazine: "Even if we freed all black and Latino inmates tomorrow, the United States would have the fourth-largest prison population in the world. " Well, given the US is the third largest country in terms of population, and that the fourth is about two thirds as numerous, that would be a good thing.
July 23, 2021
Should be required reading.
February 24, 2022
A really necessary book for understanding the long road to mass incarceration. Hinton demonstrates how racist assumptions about Black residents of cities, poverty, and crime continuously shaped federal anticrime and antipoverty policies in a way that only exacerbated crime and economic inequality. She also successfully brings out an unnerving sense of federal policymakers' and not a few white politicians' desires for social control. There is a lot of irony, ambivalence, and complexity to this history and to this book.
But Hinton is also a little bit narrow in where she looks, despite the fact that she dug through an absolute mountain of documents for her sources. Her top-down policy-oriented account of the rise of mass incarceration is absolutely crucial to the story, but the economy, and capital, too, are largely left on the sidelines. Connections between mass incarceration and the military arm of the state appear, but could be more thoroughly brought into her analysis. Doing that would make racialized connections to Vietnam and US empire a lot clearer too. And while I appreciate her move to bring liberals into the circle of blame, I'm left with a very flat understanding of what it meant to be a liberal and who liberals were. Was LBJ a liberal? Certainly not in the same way that more progressive liberal politicians and activists who continued to push for the state to address structural issues that create and sustain poverty and crime were. LBJ's rejection of the Kerner Report, e.g., which Hinton takes note of, points to the severe limits to LBJ's supposed liberalism, which then might indicate the difficulty in trying to place liberalism at the heart of the rise of mass incarceration in the way that Hinton does. And what do we do with the fact that a lot of people in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had worked with Civil Rights leaders to pass historic legislation in the mid-60s? Just have a feeling that the story might be more complicated than just those same liberals turned around and unwittingly threw a ton of Black people in jail. I'm not a liberal apologist, but if we want to unpack potential contingencies and foreclosed alternative routes this history could have taken, more nuance here would be helpful and potentially enlivening for our political possibilities today. In any case, it's well worth reading and will be a book I come back to!
But Hinton is also a little bit narrow in where she looks, despite the fact that she dug through an absolute mountain of documents for her sources. Her top-down policy-oriented account of the rise of mass incarceration is absolutely crucial to the story, but the economy, and capital, too, are largely left on the sidelines. Connections between mass incarceration and the military arm of the state appear, but could be more thoroughly brought into her analysis. Doing that would make racialized connections to Vietnam and US empire a lot clearer too. And while I appreciate her move to bring liberals into the circle of blame, I'm left with a very flat understanding of what it meant to be a liberal and who liberals were. Was LBJ a liberal? Certainly not in the same way that more progressive liberal politicians and activists who continued to push for the state to address structural issues that create and sustain poverty and crime were. LBJ's rejection of the Kerner Report, e.g., which Hinton takes note of, points to the severe limits to LBJ's supposed liberalism, which then might indicate the difficulty in trying to place liberalism at the heart of the rise of mass incarceration in the way that Hinton does. And what do we do with the fact that a lot of people in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had worked with Civil Rights leaders to pass historic legislation in the mid-60s? Just have a feeling that the story might be more complicated than just those same liberals turned around and unwittingly threw a ton of Black people in jail. I'm not a liberal apologist, but if we want to unpack potential contingencies and foreclosed alternative routes this history could have taken, more nuance here would be helpful and potentially enlivening for our political possibilities today. In any case, it's well worth reading and will be a book I come back to!
March 13, 2023
This is without a doubt an incredibly important work of historical scholarship, and yet one I suspect few will ever manage to get through. Hinton's book can easily be considered a response to, or expansion on, Michelle Alexander's classic, "The New Jim Crow." While Hinton acknowledges her debt to Alexander's work on mass incarceration, she argues that "fully accounting for this remarkable transformation in late-twentieth-century domestic policy requires beginning much earlier" than the War on Drugs. This argument is laid out in depth as she reviews the "War on Crime" that preceded Reagan's War on Drugs by more than a decade and laid the foundations for mass incarceration in the 1980's, with the expansion and centralization of law enforcement efforts via the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA) in the 60's followed by the rapid increase in prison construction in the 70s to accommodate the growing prison population and a series of policy decisions to ignore the root causes of social unrest and instead respond with punitive measures.
However, for all Hinton's brilliance, like most historians she is guilty of being quite literally exhaustive. Reading this gave me flashbacks to C. Wright Mills "The Power Elite," another brilliant, shockingly relevant and incisive work that is dry enough to cause dehydration in the reader. If anything, reading Hinton will give you a renewed appreciation for Alexander's talent for making such dour subject matter accessible. So while I wholeheartedly recommend that everyone and their brother read this, be prepared for an academic slog that is not for the causal reader.
However, for all Hinton's brilliance, like most historians she is guilty of being quite literally exhaustive. Reading this gave me flashbacks to C. Wright Mills "The Power Elite," another brilliant, shockingly relevant and incisive work that is dry enough to cause dehydration in the reader. If anything, reading Hinton will give you a renewed appreciation for Alexander's talent for making such dour subject matter accessible. So while I wholeheartedly recommend that everyone and their brother read this, be prepared for an academic slog that is not for the causal reader.
July 23, 2021
A tremendous historical ride, taking you through each policy decision that has been made over the last 50 years in the criminal justice sphere and how it led to the massively destructive incarceration system we have today. And as she says at the conclusion—the reasonings behind the decisions are interesting, but most relevant action now is reckoning with them & bringing about change.
October 25, 2023
this book was INSANE. an absolutely ridiculous wild goose chase of federal policymakers trying to figure out how to "control crime" (read: surveil black communities), creating the largest penal system in the world and, get this, NOT ACTUALLY REDUCING CRIME!!!! Hinton calls for new strategies "from residency requirements for police to civilian review boards to autonomous grassroots social programs to job creation measures...outside of the service economy" (339).
some powerful quotes from the epilogue:
"That the crime control strategies federal policymakers developed proved to have the opposite impact in the cities and neighborhoods that they placed under siege is one of the most disturbing ironies in the history of American domestic policy" (334).
"Even if all the citizens serving time for drug convictions were released, the United States would still be home to the largest penal system in the world" (340). WHEW!
some powerful quotes from the epilogue:
"That the crime control strategies federal policymakers developed proved to have the opposite impact in the cities and neighborhoods that they placed under siege is one of the most disturbing ironies in the history of American domestic policy" (334).
"Even if all the citizens serving time for drug convictions were released, the United States would still be home to the largest penal system in the world" (340). WHEW!
April 6, 2023
Alright this book is depressing, but obviously. It’s a little dry in the presentation but the information is there. Probably best for sociologists but I suppose anyone could enjoy it if you’re interested in the subject. 4.1 stars.
October 20, 2017
Easily one of the best & most important history books on 20th century America.
November 26, 2017
This was a good but sad book. I think it’s important to know this information, but nevertheless, it was a hard read for that reason.
July 21, 2025
Incredibly dense with information and extremely well researched. Should be required reading
March 8, 2017
An important contribution to the history of mass incarceration, the focus here on federal policies beginning in the 1960s.
August 10, 2016
In the middle of the 1960s, even as the black civil rights movement was winning landmark victories such as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, LBJ called for a "War on Crime", sowing the seeds for new systems of black control and oppression. Increasing crime rates became conflated with black protest, and a notion of a deep-rooted pathology in black communities took hold, initiating a pattern of focusing crime interventions in black urban environments. Flawed crime statistics and flawed criminological research reinforced racially biased policies.
Under the Johnson administration, there was a recognition that crime was rooted in poverty and unemployment, and correspondingly there was investment in a War on Poverty to reduce crime in the long term. After a few years, however, these programs were deemed to have failed. Social programs were progressively defunded or turned over to police, increasing community surveillance and contact with police, increasing arrest rates further. Policy circles agreed that rehabilitation programs were generally unsuccessful, and that crime was largely caused by a "hard core" of repeat offenders who needed to be kept off the streets. A massive program of prison construction struggled to contain a growing inmate population, fuelled by increasing arrest rates, curtailment of parole, and mandatory minimum sentencing.
The failure of these policies to reduce crime did not prevent them from being progressively intensified. Rather, it was assumed that more repeat offenders needed to be locked up, that sentences be made ever longer to increase deterrence. Lawmakers touted community involvement, but in practice communities had little influence over law enforcement. A series of Supreme Court decisions placed biased enforcement and curtailment civil rights beyond challenge. Under Reagan, the crack panic gave impetus to a renewed War on Drugs, further rationalizing aggressive policing, and asset forfeiture programs allowed policing to increase independent of federal funding. A focus on potential crime through increased patrol and surveillance of black communities, as well as a reliance on sting operations that manufactured crime in the name of fighting it, fuelled mass incarceration.
I read this as a follow-up to Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, wanting to understand more about how things got to where they are today. It goes some way towards explaining the mentality of lawmakers, government officials, mayors and police chiefs as they prosecuted the War on Crime. For me it was a harder read than its predecessor, largely due to the exhaustive wealth of detail and citations; I suspect that The New Jim Crow was written for more of a lay audience, while this book is aimed more at academics. It was also frustrating that Hinton's account ends in 1988 at the close of the Reagan presidency; an analysis of how the trends she documents continued in the Clinton presidency would have been especially interesting. But it's good as a follow-up nonetheless, enriching Alexander's portrait of how a series of decisions, enacted by Democrats and Republicans alike and untainted by obvious racial politics nevertheless worked together to form a new system of racial control and subjugation.
Under the Johnson administration, there was a recognition that crime was rooted in poverty and unemployment, and correspondingly there was investment in a War on Poverty to reduce crime in the long term. After a few years, however, these programs were deemed to have failed. Social programs were progressively defunded or turned over to police, increasing community surveillance and contact with police, increasing arrest rates further. Policy circles agreed that rehabilitation programs were generally unsuccessful, and that crime was largely caused by a "hard core" of repeat offenders who needed to be kept off the streets. A massive program of prison construction struggled to contain a growing inmate population, fuelled by increasing arrest rates, curtailment of parole, and mandatory minimum sentencing.
The failure of these policies to reduce crime did not prevent them from being progressively intensified. Rather, it was assumed that more repeat offenders needed to be locked up, that sentences be made ever longer to increase deterrence. Lawmakers touted community involvement, but in practice communities had little influence over law enforcement. A series of Supreme Court decisions placed biased enforcement and curtailment civil rights beyond challenge. Under Reagan, the crack panic gave impetus to a renewed War on Drugs, further rationalizing aggressive policing, and asset forfeiture programs allowed policing to increase independent of federal funding. A focus on potential crime through increased patrol and surveillance of black communities, as well as a reliance on sting operations that manufactured crime in the name of fighting it, fuelled mass incarceration.
I read this as a follow-up to Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, wanting to understand more about how things got to where they are today. It goes some way towards explaining the mentality of lawmakers, government officials, mayors and police chiefs as they prosecuted the War on Crime. For me it was a harder read than its predecessor, largely due to the exhaustive wealth of detail and citations; I suspect that The New Jim Crow was written for more of a lay audience, while this book is aimed more at academics. It was also frustrating that Hinton's account ends in 1988 at the close of the Reagan presidency; an analysis of how the trends she documents continued in the Clinton presidency would have been especially interesting. But it's good as a follow-up nonetheless, enriching Alexander's portrait of how a series of decisions, enacted by Democrats and Republicans alike and untainted by obvious racial politics nevertheless worked together to form a new system of racial control and subjugation.
February 6, 2017
Tough dive into the policy and policing of crime from the 60s to the 80s, very much addressing the same ground as Michelle Alexander (but as a political history rather than legal polemic) of how we constructed black criminality and accepted a fatalist view that society's only hope for law and order amid urban poverty and unrest was a permanent and increasing supervision and incarceration of our unemployed minorities. Federal policy lies at the root, with both good and ill intentions.
June 3, 2018
The US chose racism, sexism, hate, terror, and 'warehousing' - under exactly the same fear that lead to genocidal assaults against black slaves.
The assertion that the US is not racist to the very core ignores everything about this country and its history, and the white fear and exploitation that has been shipped abroad so enthusiastically under the name "democracy", as the bodies pile up to become mountains and swamps in the deserts and forests.
When yous top to think about the actual crimes of the Us, it becomes so hard to believe it could ever be anything less than the Evil Empire, let alone resemble its propaganda in the least. Raised to believe in the things my nation leads the world in destroying, and to believe that others are guilty of our sins.
The assertion that the US is not racist to the very core ignores everything about this country and its history, and the white fear and exploitation that has been shipped abroad so enthusiastically under the name "democracy", as the bodies pile up to become mountains and swamps in the deserts and forests.
When yous top to think about the actual crimes of the Us, it becomes so hard to believe it could ever be anything less than the Evil Empire, let alone resemble its propaganda in the least. Raised to believe in the things my nation leads the world in destroying, and to believe that others are guilty of our sins.
December 9, 2016
This is an excellent book and should be read by all Americans. Professor Hinton does a magnificent job tracking how the Great Society very quickly was subsumed by the war on crime. She especially does well tracking the evolution of what can only be described as a war on poor African American citizens, tracking the various programs, laws, and departments whose design seems to have been primarily to punish minorities. She doesn't pull partisan punches, and the willingness of Democrats and liberals to back these anti-crime measures as readily as their Republican counterparts receive plenty of attention, and well before Bill Clinton shifted the Democrats to the center right.
July 9, 2020
This is a solid overview of the history of police militarization in America, with a special focus on racial disparities in policing over time. It gives a good foundation for an understanding of this subject and points at some broad themes and action points for addressing this.
However, for the most part this is very textbook-y, with a zoomed-out view of the subject that often feels impersonal. There are a few places where the writing moves closer and we get a better look at specific people and moments, but by and large it's pretty dry and can be a lot to try to retain.
However, for the most part this is very textbook-y, with a zoomed-out view of the subject that often feels impersonal. There are a few places where the writing moves closer and we get a better look at specific people and moments, but by and large it's pretty dry and can be a lot to try to retain.
January 26, 2020
Maybe 2.5 stars - I had high hopes for this book as I was very interested in its subject matter but I found the very academic prose got in the way of really getting into it. The writing suffers from simultaneously being overly detailed with lots of names and acronyms while not getting deep enough on some topics. It also seemed to repeat the same point over and over. I had a hard time finding a sense of narrative in here.
April 19, 2024
According to Hinton, mass incarceration in the U.S. begins not with the conservative Nixon and Reagan administrations and their anti-drug programs, but rather with the liberal Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Crime.” Johnson was influenced by contemporary liberal social science best exemplified by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who argued that “crime” in Black communities was the product of a unique cultural “pathology” that was created by segregation and economic deprivation but that “took on a life of its own” independent of these causes. In response, Johnson sought to combine an expansion of welfare and community-led programs with intensified policing in segregated Black neighborhoods. The Carter administration followed in this mold but with smaller welfare budgets, and subsequent Republican administrations tightened welfare spending but continued to ramp up policing. Interestingly, Democrats still tended to widely acknowledge the economic roots of “crime” and understand criminal justice as “rehabilitative”, while Republicans tended to ignore or dismiss economics and eventually naturalized “crime” as a cultural inevitability of Black neighborhoods that could only be contained or deterred.
Why did Johnson and so many other liberals of his day combine a “war on poverty” with a “war on crime”? Well, according to Hinton, it was quite simply because they were afflicted by racist “assumptions” that associated Black people with criminality and anticipated that they would engage in criminal activity. In her understanding, such “assumptions” seem to exist outside of history, explaining everything but requiring nearly no explanation themselves, and they are sufficient to explain the massive transformation of the American state over the span of decades. (She occasionally toys with the notion that these “assumptions” became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, because racist policing generated skewed crime statistics and encouraged crime itself — a clever but equally unsatisfying idea).
This is the kind of thing you only believe if you have been educated out of all good sense by elite universities and live totally disconnected from most of society. Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow, while failing to appreciate the bipartisan and multi-racial coalition behind mass incarceration, at least offered the compelling materialist explanation that capitalists were using racist policing to divide the working class. Hinton, by contrast, is remarkably incurious about why her subjects believe something that to her is obviously wrong. Funnily enough, she deploys a selective materialism throughout this book — she (rightly) treats it as obvious that Black “crime” is the result of racialized economic deprivation and dismisses theories of Black pathology out of hand. We are left in a world where white people are motivated by pathological racist ideas and Black people are motivated by legitimate material concerns — a sort of inverted Moynihanism.
In the last chapter of the book, we get a small taste of what motivates Hinton to create such a picture when she tacitly endorses Black nationalism. Hinton believes in a program of economic redistribution to create equality between white and Black capitalists, a process that would certainly create material improvements for the Black working class but at the price of any deeper emancipation from capitalist exploitation and racial ideology. Writing in 2016, she is one of the precocious liberal writers who anticipated the massively renewed popularity of Black nationalism in 2020 as liberals sought to co-opt the George Floyd uprisings — an achievement for which she is certain to be rewarded professionally.
What Hinton (perhaps deliberately) misses, and what deserves more exploration, is the connection between racial policing and racial integration. As works like James Forman Jr.’s “Locking up Our Own” demonstrate, carceral policies commanded widespread support among many Black elites, who used their influence to draw in support from many ordinary Black people and have seemed to have come out decently well despite the depredations inflicted on the most deprived Black neighborhoods. The uplift of this new Black bourgeoisie was precisely the goal of Johnson, and in significant measure it succeeded, in spite of the loss of autonomy and continued economic subordination they have suffered under neoliberalism. Hinton’s book was written after the crisis of 2008, when the benefits of racial integration within existing economic institutions seemed to reach some hard limits. Accordingly, it attempts to walk the fine line of getting liberals to denounce proponents of racial policing within their own ranks while concealing the fact that the class interests that celebrate Black nationalism today are the same that squashed its earlier, more radical separatist and socialist forms in the 60s and 70s. From the War on Crime to today’s movement for racial reparations, the methods change but the goals remain the same.
Why did Johnson and so many other liberals of his day combine a “war on poverty” with a “war on crime”? Well, according to Hinton, it was quite simply because they were afflicted by racist “assumptions” that associated Black people with criminality and anticipated that they would engage in criminal activity. In her understanding, such “assumptions” seem to exist outside of history, explaining everything but requiring nearly no explanation themselves, and they are sufficient to explain the massive transformation of the American state over the span of decades. (She occasionally toys with the notion that these “assumptions” became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, because racist policing generated skewed crime statistics and encouraged crime itself — a clever but equally unsatisfying idea).
This is the kind of thing you only believe if you have been educated out of all good sense by elite universities and live totally disconnected from most of society. Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow, while failing to appreciate the bipartisan and multi-racial coalition behind mass incarceration, at least offered the compelling materialist explanation that capitalists were using racist policing to divide the working class. Hinton, by contrast, is remarkably incurious about why her subjects believe something that to her is obviously wrong. Funnily enough, she deploys a selective materialism throughout this book — she (rightly) treats it as obvious that Black “crime” is the result of racialized economic deprivation and dismisses theories of Black pathology out of hand. We are left in a world where white people are motivated by pathological racist ideas and Black people are motivated by legitimate material concerns — a sort of inverted Moynihanism.
In the last chapter of the book, we get a small taste of what motivates Hinton to create such a picture when she tacitly endorses Black nationalism. Hinton believes in a program of economic redistribution to create equality between white and Black capitalists, a process that would certainly create material improvements for the Black working class but at the price of any deeper emancipation from capitalist exploitation and racial ideology. Writing in 2016, she is one of the precocious liberal writers who anticipated the massively renewed popularity of Black nationalism in 2020 as liberals sought to co-opt the George Floyd uprisings — an achievement for which she is certain to be rewarded professionally.
What Hinton (perhaps deliberately) misses, and what deserves more exploration, is the connection between racial policing and racial integration. As works like James Forman Jr.’s “Locking up Our Own” demonstrate, carceral policies commanded widespread support among many Black elites, who used their influence to draw in support from many ordinary Black people and have seemed to have come out decently well despite the depredations inflicted on the most deprived Black neighborhoods. The uplift of this new Black bourgeoisie was precisely the goal of Johnson, and in significant measure it succeeded, in spite of the loss of autonomy and continued economic subordination they have suffered under neoliberalism. Hinton’s book was written after the crisis of 2008, when the benefits of racial integration within existing economic institutions seemed to reach some hard limits. Accordingly, it attempts to walk the fine line of getting liberals to denounce proponents of racial policing within their own ranks while concealing the fact that the class interests that celebrate Black nationalism today are the same that squashed its earlier, more radical separatist and socialist forms in the 60s and 70s. From the War on Crime to today’s movement for racial reparations, the methods change but the goals remain the same.
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