Rethinking Urban America through the Lens of the Carceral State

In the last forty years, America’s cities have been the site of more arrests than ever before in their history that, in turn, has led this nation as a whole to imprison more people than any other country on the globe. ¹ By 2011, not only were there more than seven million people under some form of correctional control in the United States, but those people disproportionately heralded from the poorest neighborhoods of major cities and were overwhelmingly and staggeringly people of color. It is now well established that such concentrated and racially disparate incarceration in poor urban neighborhoods stemmed from policy decisions not from historically remarkable rates of crime. ² What is more, despite recent headlines suggesting that the nation began, finally, to decarcerate in 2014, the evidence from states across the country suggests differently.

Despite these realties, scholars of urban history and the American metropole have, to date, asked remarkably few questions about the buildup of such a massive carceral state. And, because we have not yet fully probed this major punitive turn in American policy and culture, we have not even begun to consider the ways in which our existing urban historiography might be limited having missed such an important elephant in the room.

We are only beginning to understand, for example, how policies of the War on Crime may have clashed with or even intersected with policies of the War on Poverty that were begun nearly simultaneously in 1965. We also know very little about how progressive attempts of penal reform at the local level may have been superseded by the punitive turn in federal carceral policy. As important, we have not even begun fully to unpack how concerns about urban criminality in the city suburbs shaped the history of the metropolitan region as a whole. And finally, we still know too little about how urbanites themselves experienced escalating carcerality. From black urban youth, to mothers on welfare, to the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community in cities, to urban Latinos, what America’s postwar punitive turn really looked like on the ground is murky. That is, until this volume of the Journal of Urban History.

Julilly Kohler-Hausmann’s essay, “Welfare Crises, Penal Solutions, and the Origins of the ‘Welfare Queen,’” for example, will ask scholars to consider the ways in which poor neighborhoods were particularly easy locales to wage a new War on Crime after the mid-1960s precisely because they were already being served by the War on Poverty. Kohler-Hausmann traces the transformation of AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) programs in the 1970s and early 1980s as individual states implemented penal approaches that criminalized recipients’ attempts to supplement meager benefits that kept them in precarious and unsustainable poverty. While the welfare rights movement curtailed the practice of unannounced home visits, in 1975 Illinois adopted a new carceral approach to welfare fraud resulting in tri-annual assessments to gauge continued eligibility. These “redetermination programs” resulted in forms of state and community surveillance that encouraged neighbors to report recipients as “welfare cheats.” Ultimately, this early era of punitive welfare reform vastly increased the criminalization of urban space by implementing new forms of control and surveillance, with many of the nation’s poorest people subjected to prosecutions that left them further marginalized from the mainstream economy with little hope of legal employment. Kohler-Hausmann’s piece makes an important contribution to the burgeoning historical literature on the carceral state by showing how carceral practices grew out of an older redistributive welfare system rather than simply replacing it as the state evolved from social service provision to punishment as narrated in many of the sociological, meta-theoretical approaches to mass incarceration.

Yohuru William’s piece, “Between a Rock and Hard Place: Delaware Prison Reform and the Urban Landscape 1961-1977,” also reexamines the carceral city through a broader temporal lens. By looking at a Delaware, a borderland state situated between northern and southern forms of punishment and criminal justice, Williams provides a window onto the fate of progressive penal reform on the eve of mass incarceration. The efforts of progressive criminologist Paul Keve point to an alternate possibility to the mass criminalization of urban space that followed in the years to come. The radical penologist looked to Delaware’s cities as primary sites of rehabilitation, only to see these efforts defeated by a coalition of rural and suburban Delaware politicians who swept into office by rallying against school desegregation and decarceration programs. Opponents of Delaware’s Community-Based Corrections (CBC) program used the sensational case of Aubrey McKay, a participant in the state’s work release program, to defund and stop its advance, thereby paving the way for the state’s adoption of mass incarceration policies. William’s local study reminds us that the “New Jim Crow” was not inevitable. Sadly, the national rush to mandatory minimums in the postwar years derailed experimental efforts in decarceration, making progressive reforms in penology politically and economically unsustainable.

Equally important to rethinking how War on Crime policies shaped America’s inner cities was the effect of law and order campaigns in the postwar suburbs. In his essay, “Pushers, Victims, and the Lost Innocence of White Suburbia: California’s War on Narcotics during the 1950s,” Lassiter explores the roots of the modern drug war in the state’s passage of harsh mandatory minimums for drug possession and distribution. In the 1950s, a perceived narcotics crisis in Los Angeles suburbs prompted a broad-based mobilization against “dope peddlers.” Racist anxieties focused on Mexican Americans provided much of the ballast for this punitive turn, as the newspapers reported sensational stories of white female youth besieged by “wolf” and “rat packs.” Implicit to this earlier discourse of drugs and crime was a suburban crisis narrative in which an epidemic of marijuana and heroine use threatened white middle-class adolescents proximate to black and brown urban youth. In response, state government criminalized nonwhite “dope peddlers” by focusing overwhelmingly on young Mexican and African Americans, while establishing “discretionary loopholes” to prevent the prosecution of affluent white youth for drug possession and sale. Lassiter demonstrates how this little-known earlier War on Drugs predates Nixon and Rockefeller’s vaunted antidrug campaigns. In contrast to an older scholarly literature that views the drug war as reflecting the rise of the electoral right, Lassiter shows that Southern California’s suburban drug crisis was far from a Republican invention. Indeed, established California liberal Democrats Kenneth Hahn and Pat Brown played a crucial role in the development of mandatory minimums in California, which represented a joint “racial and spatial” project across partisan lines.

The cities that suburban parents so feared, though, were in reality, as Elizabeth Kai Hinton points out, much more frightening places for black youth to live once architects of the War on Crime decided that they were the particular enemy, who deserved “preemptive” policing. In her piece, “Creating Crime: The Rise and Impact of National Juvenile Delinquency Programs in Black Urban Neighborhoods,” Hinton explores how the modern carceral state emerged out of the federal government’s integration of the War on Poverty and the War on Crime in the late 1960s. The state’s targeting of black youth to prevent “future crime” laid the foundations for broad surveillance and social control regimes in urban schools, public housing, and social welfare. Ironically, liberal policy makers of the Johnson era created much of the infrastructure for this punitive turn in juvenile justice policy. Youth Services Bureaus initially blended social service provision with crime prevention, but after the passage of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, the rate of juvenile incarceration rapidly increased, reaching its height in 1995. Criminalization and use of the anticipatory “potentiality clause” created a “self-fulfilling prophecy” in which low-income youth of color who found themselves surveilled and arbitrarily detained suffered further marginalization and alienation from the state. Hinton’s pioneering research provides the first national account of the federal government’s role in blending social welfare and criminal justice policy to create unprecedented arrest and mass incarceration of black youth.

As Tim Stewart-Winter notes in his piece, “The Law and Order Origins of Urban Gay Politics,” the intensification of policing in America’s cities had a profound impact on the lives of gay and lesbian urbanites as well. In his much-needed study of Chicago in the second half of the twentieth century, Stewart-Winter shows how law enforcement’s expanding powers catalyzed the local gay rights movement. In documenting this history, he addresses gaps in both LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) historiography and in the emerging carceral studies field. The former has largely neglected the role of criminalization, incarceration, and aggressive policing in the homophile and gay liberation movements, while the latter has failed to incorporate the shifting legal ground of same sex coupling into the narrative of the modern carceral state. At the heart of this lost history lies a paradox. In the 1970s just as the War on Drugs and other policies driving mass incarceration accelerated, half of U.S. states repealed sodomy laws. In place of an antipolice violence coalition between African Americans and white gay radicals in the 1970s, by the 1980s and 1990s, gay politics instead centered on reforms, such as the recruitment of gay and lesbian police officers and the monitoring of hate crimes and antigay violence, that could more readily coexist with enhanced policing. This paved the way for more recent conflicts, like that around Chicago’s “Take Back Boystown” movement, that pit comparatively affluent white gays and lesbians against African Americans and other residents of color. His piece shows how the shifting historical dimensions of the carceral state have affected antipolice coalitions across the divides of race, sexuality, and gender.

Finally, in Robert Chase’s piece “Cell Taught, Self Taught: Urban Chicanos, Rural Prisons, and the Prisoners’ Rights Movement,” readers are reminded that the American carceral state of the later twentieth century did not originate exlusively in the criminalization of urban centers of the North nor of African Americans. As Chase’s study of urban Chicanos incarcerated in Texas’ rural prison farms indicates, mass incarceration was very much rooted in the hyper-policing of Chicano/a populations in southwestern cities as well. Indeed, growing up in these cities and then finding themselves locked up and forced to labor on rural prison farms generated a distinct brand of Chicano militancy in this period that scholars of urban spaces and social movements alike need to reckon with more fully. As Chase argues, in the American South and Southwest, the coerced dislocation of urban populations of color meant that it was not just northern prisons such as Attica that were impacted by the growing number of people who witnessed and were shaped by the urban protest movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. Rural prison farms like the one where activists Fred Cruz and David Ruiz were incarcerated found their inmate population increasingly filled with young men from southwestern cities who had participated in a vibrant Chicano movement dedicated to the politics of social justice in their own neighborhoods. Ultimately the Texas prison system was changed not simply because it had prison rebels like Ruiz or Cruz, but because they held men whose youth had been deeply steeped in this radical tradition of urban Chicano activism.

The richly nuanced articles collected in this special issue of the Journal of Urban History not only give historians of urban and metropolitan spaces a great deal to consider anew, but they also suggest much that we still need to examine. We might learn much more, for example, about the ways in which domestic campaigns that targeted and criminalized youth of color may have overlapped, converged with state and city politics in new ways, or even altered the way in which urban spaces were funded. Greater attention to the links between the Johnson-era War on Crime and the subsequent declarations of war(s) on drugs, gangs and terrorism at the federal, state and local levels is also desperately needed to flesh out the contours of the modern carceral state. In addition, more oral history-based, grassroots research into resistance to mass imprisonment and other carceral practices is also needed. Robert Chase’s piece reminds us of the importance of whole categories of activism that have received little attention from historians, including that of “writ writers” and “jail house lawyers.” Such new documentation of multiple modes of resistance to the carceral state would augment top-down institutional histories of this country’s punitive turn in very valuable ways.

How, for example, might we make sense of the Congressional Black Caucus’ overwhelming support for President Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs when so many in the black community opposed the criminalization of drugs in earlier decades of the War on Crime? The divisions of class and urban geography that helped facilitate elite backing for anticrime policies each need much greater documentation from historians.

We also very clearly need much more work on how histories of policing in urban America intersect with histories of the carceral state. These two literatures remain remarkably distinct, even though it is clear that the rise of such a massive prison system in this nation relied upon the intensive policing of urban spaces. Historians might explore, for example, how policing practices changed or did not change once the War on Crime began in 1964. Indeed, given the long history of racialized policing in urban America, there is much to explore regarding exactly why urban policing resulted not just in such racialized imprisonment in the postwar period, but also why it led to historically unprecedented levels of incarceration after 1972,

Historians might turn their attention as well to some serious explorations of violence in urban America over time and vis-à-vis the nation’s policy embrace of a more punitive and ever-expanding carceral state. So much contemporary attention is given to high rates of inner city violence as, somehow, an explanation for particularly targeted policing as well as high rates of imprisonment in this country. And, yet, this discussion has been placed in little historical context. In what ways were earlier moments of urban violence different from the current moment, and to what can we attribute this ill either in the past or present once we begin to think of violence as something historically contingent rather than static.

In sum, there is still so much to learn that historians can about American cities and suburbs if they examine them through the lens of the carceral state. How, for instance, does gender relationships or norms shape the carceral experience of those living in cities or suburbs as the War on Crime and War on Drugs waged on? And what is the relationship between the high proportion of the mentally ill who reside in cities and who ends up incarcerated? And how does the relationship between race and the carceral state look different when we move not only from southern metropolitan areas to northern, or from eastern cities to western, but when we look at communities of Asian Americans or Puerto Ricans instead of Chicanos African Americans or whites? What about how other urban institutions, such as foster care facilities or schools or hospitals may have been impacted by the rise of such a massive carceral state? Or how might the health of city residents have been affected? And, finally, what about changes over vast periods of time? Although much of this newest work on urban history and the carceral state is centered in the late twentieth century, how might understandings of America’s cities in the eighteenth or nineteenth century also change if we explored them through the lens of crime and punishment?

It is our hope that this special issue of the Journal of Urban History peaks the interest of urban historians everywhere to think in new ways about the work that we do. We hope that it inspires us all to ask new questions about the urban and suburban spaces that we already study and that it helps us all to complicate the way we understand America’s metropolis in all centuries, in all regions, and no matter the historical actors. There is indeed much to explore and even more to learn.