From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America *(eBook)
Co-Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A Wall Street Journal Favorite Book of the Year A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year A Publishers Weekly Favorite Book of the Year 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. “An extraordinary and important new book.” ―Jill Lepore, New Yorker “Hinton’s book is more than an argument; it is a revelation…There are moments that will make your skin crawl…This is history, but the implications for today are striking. Readers will learn how the militarization of the police that we’ve witnessed in Ferguson and elsewhere had roots in the 1960s.” ―Imani Perry, New York Times Book Review Read more
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Why Must Read From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America?
This is an excellent book that systematically explains the evolution of America's crime control policy in the African American community. Starting with the President Johnson's Great Society programs and anti-poverty initiatives, Hinton traces how these programs which started out dealing with unemployment, social isolation and marginalization as one of the main factors in black poverty and crime but over time morphed into programs that did not support community participation and improvement but rather focused on punitive measures to contain the symptoms of poverty rather than its root cause. The author argues that this change started with the urban uprisings in the 1960's when violence and criminality in the black community began to be viewed as more of a as a cultural pathology inherent within the group of people and their community rather than as a reaction to the desperate situations that many of these communities were in. This is in contrast to the treatment of white poverty especially that in a rural setting which was treated more as a problem that could be overcome with proper assistance rather than just contained and punished. The author argues that once started down this road anti crime measures and the policing of the black community became a kind of self sustaining system as the view of crime in minority communities became to be viewed exclusively as a law enforcement issue from one administration to the next. Even though the programs ( which had hundreds of millions of dollars spent on them never seemed to achieve their goals) successive administrations continued to throw money at them since they viewed them as the only way to contain if not fix the problem of "black criminality" a concept that was a creation of the very programs that the government had created. As I read this I was reminded of the concept of the " self licking ice cream cone": a program or policy that souly exists to combat a problem that it has created and identified. I recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in the history of law enforcement policy or the history of the black community.
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