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    From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
    From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
    From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
    Audiobook13 hours

    From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America

    Written by Elizabeth Hinton

    Narrated by Josh Bloomberg

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateDec 6, 2016
    ISBN9781515984665
    From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
    Author

    Elizabeth Hinton

    ELIZABETH HINTON is associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University. She is the author of America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s and From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America.

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    Reviews for From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime

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    • 3/5
      How the feds were involved in the creation of the largest carceral state in the world, starting with antipoverty programs that were funneled at least in part through police/law enforcement structures because that was politically simple. The antipoverty focus faded but the crime control remained. Hinton argues that things like after-school programs overseen by police exposed poor kids, especially poor Black kids, to enhanced surveillance, though she doesn’t actually seem to provide evidence that the recordkeeping was such that this really worsened the situation for them. Funding for greater incarceration and moves to longer sentences, by contrast, clearly did.
    • 3/5
      Interesting look at how the war on poverty led to over-policing in African-American areas, but it felt like it was written in the the time it covered, so much so that the epilogue seemed incongruous.