Creating Crime

Merging the War on Poverty with the War on Crime

The urban civil disorder of the 1960s provided a justification for the federal government’s punitive turn and a general strategy of preventing future outbreaks by attacking juvenile delinquency. Images of so-called rioters throwing rocks, beating white civilians, and setting fire to property intensified the association between black Americans and criminality that had permeated the popular imagination since slavery. At the dawn of the twentieth century, when segregationist regimes embedded racial hierarchies explicitly into law with Jim Crow, industrialist regimes in the North did the same implicitly through the use of reported crime statistics. As the historian Khalil Muhammad has demonstrated, a critical mass of social scientists, policymakers, media outlets, and public figures based their ideas about the “criminal nature” of former slaves on the disproportionate and ascendant number of black Americans ensnared within the clutches of the criminal justice system in the decades after emancipation. Although the statistics reflected the targeted restrictions state governments imposed on newly freed people, the data shaped the development of American criminal law and the inherently racist dimensions of the justice system thereafter. ¹¹ In the popular and political imagination, this dynamic reinforced the links between blackness and crime that remain a guiding principle of American law enforcement.

The idea that criminality was a pathological trait among black Americans in general, and black youth in particular, grounded discriminatory law enforcement practices throughout the twentieth century. During the Progressive era, when the connection between racially marginalized youth and crime emerged as a common stereotype, state and local governments turned to welfare institutions to exert greater control over young black Americans termed “delinquent.” ¹² In the postwar period, officials managed white fears about neighborhood and school integration by focusing on youth-based punitive programs in a number of major metropolitan areas. ¹³ Alongside civil rights reform and subsequent incidents of urban unrest, the federal government joined state and local governments and started to invest in juvenile crime control measures. New Frontier and Great Society programs therefore synthesized some fifty years of local policy responses to delinquent behavior by interweaving law enforcement and the social services implemented by the War on Poverty.

Although early ventures into antipoverty policy had conjoined social welfare and social control objectives, the juvenile-focused programs created by the Kennedy administration uniquely positioned the federal government in low-income black communities. ¹⁴ Beginning in 1961, the Office of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Development pioneered Youth Opportunity Centers and Manpower Development and Training Act programs that sought to address juvenile delinquency by fighting urban inequality. ¹⁵ President Kennedy’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime funded a number of community-based prevention programs from New Haven to Los Angeles premised on grassroots participation and job training. ¹⁶ The policy gave the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare purview over juvenile delinquency prevention and eventually served as a legislative precedent for Johnson’s War on Poverty and the more comprehensive juvenile delinquency package his administration later developed for the War on Crime.

While many historians have assessed the successes and failure of the Great Society and decentered the regional variations within antipoverty initiatives, few have noted that the Johnson administration’s domestic policy also contained an integral law enforcement program. ¹⁷ In March 1965, when Johnson called on Congress to “begin a thorough, intelligent, and effective war against crime,” the administration meant to increase opportunity and decrease violence in segregated urban neighborhoods by launching the War on Crime inside the Great Society. Along with the Voting Rights Act and the Housing Urban Development Act the administration sent Congress that month, Johnson offered up the Law Enforcement Assistance Act. ¹⁸ Taken together, these policies functioned as the capstone of the federal government’s response to the demands of civil rights protestors, but Johnson’s crime control package would have an increasingly important impact on American society and subsequent national policy.

Shortly after the wave of urban uprisings in the wake of Martin Luther King’s murder in the spring of 1968, Johnson took the first legislative steps that would enlarge the carceral state. ¹⁹ The Safe Streets Act identified black urban neighborhoods as the primary battleground for the War on Crime, and the Juvenile Delinquency and Prevention Act established funding channels and incentives between the federal government and existing urban programs and crime control institutions at the local level. Facing budget shortages, many agencies operating in low-income urban neighborhoods embraced the newly available delinquency prevention grants by incorporating crime control provisions into their programming and criminal justice officials into their leadership. Once the Johnson administration set the national crime control program in motion, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare turned to corrections and juvenile justice work as a critical source of funding for the first time.

The fusion of social services and law enforcement measures occurred as policymakers argued that autonomous grassroots organizations had failed to maintain order and disinvested the federal government from Community Action Programs. With the idea of “maximum feasible participation” facing mounting criticism from public figures, Congress, Mayors, and the President, the Johnson administration ceded the authority of grassroots activists and social workers to professional planners and law enforcement officials. ²⁰ As a result, court personnel, rehabilitation centers, and punitive agencies came to enjoy new degrees of power over their “clients” in low-income urban areas. At the same time, as officials stripped grassroots organizations of funding, local residents found themselves increasingly shut out of decision making over the most critical issues shaping their lives. ²¹

Youth Service Bureaus were the center of the Johnson administration’s blueprint for the War on Crime. The Bureaus operated in low-income communities across the United States, effectively blended law enforcement and social welfare programs, and provided an alternative to detention as well as necessary services in segregated urban areas. As a diversion agency, the Bureaus eased an overburdened juvenile justice system by placing youth charged with minor offenses under community supervision. As the coordinator of all community-based services for urban young people, the Bureaus promised to fill the vacuum policymakers identified between traditional justice and social welfare agencies by acting as, in the words of Missouri’s Democratic Congressman James Symington, an “institutional substitute for parents.” ²²

The federal government strategically placed the service bureau outside the formal juvenile justice system to keep thousands of low-income youth under informal supervision and to avoid the stigma and potential community outrage that policymakers acknowledged would likely follow the placement of new coercive law enforcement centers in black neighborhoods. ²³ The Bureaus’ “primary target client group” was defined as “those youth in danger of becoming delinquent.” It was a focus that seemed, “the best way to protect society,” in the words of Attorney General Ramsey Clark, “because for better or for worse, these people are going to be with us, and we had better get them straightened out.” ²⁴ In practice, the Bureau program focused almost exclusively on its intended demographic: the average participant was a black fifteen-year-old who had not come into contact with the formal justice system. In fact, only a quarter of the 200,000 participants nationwide even had arrest records. ²⁵

The programs established as part of the War on Poverty had already “laid the ingredients” that eased the shift toward professionalized programs like the Service Bureau. ²⁶ One of the best examples of this transition occurred in the troubled city of Bridgeport, Connecticut. On the city’s East Side, where dilapidated buildings, vacant lots, empty stores, and low-income housing comprised the landscape, the Neighborhood Hall House had served the black and Puerto Rican community living across the railroad tracks from downtown Bridgeport for some fifty years. Almost immediately following the Safe Streets Act, the Hall House evolved into a Youth Service Bureau. ²⁷ Staff (most of whom also lived on the East Side) began to attend juvenile court proceedings to recruit young people to the center, and began to fund recreational programs and cultural field trips with grants from the Department of Justice. ²⁸

Existing organizations, schools, and parents referred youth to Hall House and other Bureaus, but the federal government also required the agencies to accept all referrals from police departments and the court system. This marked an entirely new approach to identifying Americans in need of social services. Now community centers tied to law enforcement institutions provided recreation, educational, and employment programs to youth who previously received such opportunities from autonomous social welfare institutions. ²⁹ To qualify for services in many cases, youth had to be designated by professionals and social workers as “predelinquent.” In San Antonio, Texas, three separate neighborhoods where the Johnson administration supported comprehensive antipoverty services via Model Cities programs established Bureaus in ground-floor public housing apartments. Funds from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare allowed local police officers to bring misdemeanants or youth they identified as “troubled” to the Service Center (located in the same housing project where the young person lived) instead of making a formal charge. Even though the Bureau helped these youth to avoid formal charges, it nevertheless introduced a punitive program inside the living quarters of the Model Cities constituency.

Similarly, the Youth Intercept Project in the Model Cities area of Kansas City worked on an individual basis with young people from the ages of nine to thirteen who had been identified “predelinquent” by schools or the criminal justice system. Each youth received a caseworker who offered general counseling and tutoring, made school visits, and helped unemployed family members find jobs. ³⁰ While Community Action Programs sought to benefit the low-income communities in San Antonio and Kansas City as a whole, now law enforcement funding and the crime control imperatives of the Bureaus and other service agencies restricted these programs to young people who had been identified as vulnerable to crime and who seemingly required additional supervision.

In the South Bronx, where some 250,000 mostly black and Puerto Rican residents lived within twenty square blocks and the unemployment rate approximated 60 percent, every participant in the Neighborhood Youth Diversion Program had received a referral from the court system, and every recipient of the program’s comprehensive services had received an adjudication. Regarded as a model Youth Service Bureau by law enforcement officials, the Diversion Program was established in November 1970 with a grant from the Department of Justice and with planning support from consultants at Fordham and the Vera Institute. Staff received training in conciliation and arbitration to resolve interpersonal and family problems as an alternative to formal court proceedings. Operating from a four-story dilapidated building the city had once condemned and slated for destruction, the Diversion Program affiliated with the New York Department of Probation and received additional funding from the police department. The power of local law enforcement in the program set eligibility requirements and concentrated the agency’s resources on children and teenagers under criminal justice supervision. ³¹

The aim here was to prevent crime by identifying future criminals. The social programs offered by the Bureaus would assist in this process while providing necessary services to vulnerable residents. Although the South Bronx Diversion Program and other Bureaus provided new outlets for recreation and afterschool activities in an effort to reach “predelinquents,” these agencies precipitated contact between low-income youth of color and law enforcement officials. For example, the Russell Youth Service Bureau in Louisville functioned as a local drop-in center where black youngsters from the surrounding neighborhood could use pool tables and engage in other activities after school. Staff worked with thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds with minor offenses and young people with school disciplinary problems while fostering conversations at churches and housing projects about new programs for young residents. ³² The Roving Youth Leaders Service Bureau in the segregated black municipality of Fairmont Heights, Maryland, and directly adjacent to Washington, D.C., offered training programs to “direct juveniles toward acceptable standards of social conduct” as well as arts and crafts activities, college application assistance, and drug counseling. These and other Bureaus were required to accept referrals from police departments and the court system, but in return social workers and volunteers sent youths with whom the agencies could not “deal effectively” to the court system. ³³

The majority of federal policymakers favored the Bureaus as a necessary crime prevention measure and a more humanitarian alternative to detention. As the Task Force on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime reported to Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, the goal of Youth Service Bureaus and community-based supervisory institutions, “would be to keep the juvenile functioning in the family and community without recourse to the official sanctioning system for as long as feasible.” ³⁴ The idea was that many War on Poverty and Great Society programs “tend to focus their attention on ‘better’ young people to the partial or complete exclusion of the delinquent group,” as White House officials believed. ³⁵ Working primarily in “slum areas, where delinquency is highest,” the Bureaus would ensure that youth identified as delinquent would not be neglected from social welfare opportunities and fundamental services. ³⁶

A critical minority of federal officials did recognize the fundamental danger of labeling young people in a preemptive manner. “As soon as we start dealing with the kids in [certain] categories as potential delinquents,” one official at the Department of Justice warned in 1967, “and we put that label on them, we may be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.” ³⁷ A study of Youth Service Bureaus conducted by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare similarly observed six years later: “Once a juvenile is identified as a delinquent . . . the stigma resulting from a delinquency record can produce multiple handicaps: increased police surveillance, neighborhood isolation, lowered receptivity and tolerance by school officials, and rejection by prospective employers.” ³⁸ Yet these insights went largely ignored by policymakers, who pursued a crime war strategy focused on the supervision of “predelinquent” black youth and the relentless expansion of the carceral state around them.

The Surveillance of Black Youth

Crime continued to rise even as federal policymakers devised increasingly active means to fight against it during the first half of the 1970s. The discouraging figures convinced the White House and Congress that crime was a foregone conclusion in low-income African American communities, where, it was said, cultural pathologies and inadequate parental supervision fostered delinquency and violence. ³⁹ To “deal with those who are preying on us within the country,” as Indiana Senator Birch Bayh declared of the problem, the federal government reconstituted the American juvenile justice system. ⁴⁰ One of the most powerful Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Bayh guided the direction of national juvenile delinquency programs from the Kennedy administration onward. For Bayh (who called urban delinquency a “matter of internal defense”) and for his colleagues in Congress (who similarly deemed youth criminality, “a growing threat to the national welfare requiring immediate, comprehensive, and effective action by the federal government”), the expansion of urban surveillance and increasingly punitive guidelines for social problems could effectively contain the problem. ⁴¹ With delinquency framed as a matter of national security, Bayh led Congress in considerably enlarging the national system for young offenders in the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974.

The first major piece of domestic policy Gerald Ford signed into law, the legislation moved delinquency programs from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to the Department of Justice as a solution to the perceived breakdown of urban social institutions. Federal policymakers now saw the national juvenile delinquency program premised on rehabilitation and prevention as “inadequate to meet the needs of the countless abandoned and dependent children who, because of this failure to provide effective services, may become delinquents.” ⁴² Infused with popular and scholarly assumptions about black cultural pathology, the language of the legislation implied that the remnants of Great Society programs had worsened the crime problem, and only criminal justice and law enforcement institutions could offer “effective” services in low-income urban communities. Thus, Congress empowered the Department of Justice to anchor the national program and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention established by the Act. Charged with disbursing $600 million in block grants to the states—a striking increase over the initial $14 million Congress allocated toward the effort in 1969—the Office would determine funding levels based on age and income to support the development of youth-based crime control programs with greater federal oversight. ⁴³ The shift vastly enhanced the power and influence of the Justice Department, which received its single largest operating budget up to that point, when Congress allocated nearly $900 million to national crime control in 1974. ⁴⁴

Beyond the scope of the investment in the nation’s juvenile justice system, the legislation contained a potentiality clause that signaled a pivotal shift in the direction of the War on Crime, one that firmly embedded the carceral state in black urban neighborhoods. As defined by the legislation, a “juvenile delinquency program” constituted any activity related to, “the development of neglected, abandoned, or dependent youth and other youth who are potential criminals.” ⁴⁵ This clause granted law enforcement and criminal justice institutions authority in the lives of all youth whose families received government assistance or who participated in urban social programs. ⁴⁶ It was a provision “based on anticipation of future actions,” an approach that exceeded the labeling categories devised during the Johnson and Nixon administrations and opened up a new field of surveillance in segregated urban communities. ⁴⁷

While remaining entirely race-neutral in its language, Congress inscribed a specific racial demographic in the terms of the legislation. Black youth overwhelmingly fell into the category of “potential delinquent,” defined as any young person who appeared to be prone to contact with penal and juridical authorities. ⁴⁸ This disparity was a consequence of Youth Service Bureaus and other crime war strategies during the Johnson and Nixon administrations that targeted black urban neighborhoods for increased surveillance and patrol. By the end of Nixon’s first term, as urban law enforcement continued to intensify alongside the rise of criminal justice data and research, young black men were held responsible for the majority of the nation’s crime. When the Ford administration and Congress enacted the Juvenile Justice Act in 1974, black men under the age of twenty-four had the highest arrest rates in the United States. ⁴⁹

The sweeping reach of the potentiality clause meant many groups that had previously engaged in social service programs established by the liberal welfare state could now receive support from the crime control programs established by the carceral state, and in many cases depended on funding from national law enforcement institutions to survive. Under the terms of the 1974 Act, any public or private agency serving those Americans identified as “in danger of becoming delinquents and their families” could now receive federal juvenile justice grants, and any youth-based program conducted by the entire spectrum of domestic social institutions—including the Departments of Housing and Urban Development; Labor; and the Office of Economic Opportunity—constituted a delinquency program. ⁵⁰

For the remainder of the 1970s and beyond, the potentiality clause brought surveillance equipment, patrol forces, and probation officers into the everyday lives of young Americans who survived on public assistance, lived in housing projects, or attended urban public schools. In Washington, D.C., the police department established the Action for Children in Trouble Team to identify potential criminals by attacking truancy, viewed by policymakers as a gateway to delinquency. The Department of Justice funded 75 percent of the cost of the program, which involved interrogations of suspected truants in a public housing apartment owned by the police department but disguised to look like a comfortable family room. ⁵¹ The “Prevention of Delinquency Through Intensive Supervision” program, or PODTIS, administered by the Probation Office in Los Angeles, handled less serious first-time offenders. ⁵² PODTIS enabled officers to work within low-income, mostly black families in Compton to “keep the youngster in the community and get the family communications reestablished and get the family problems worked out” by combining crime control with social services. ⁵³

Urban school systems also evolved into critical sites of contact as a result of juvenile delinquency policy in the 1970s. In Los Angeles and other major cities, law enforcement officials guarded schools like prisons, with monitored entrances, stationed patrol cars, and flying helicopters. Not only did teachers working in South Central lock their classrooms from the inside, federal law enforcement assistance supported special school task forces with up to one hundred assigned police officers. ⁵⁴ The widespread use of police-school liaisons to patrol urban junior high and high school campuses, the cameras installed to monitor children on school buses, the metal detectors at the entrances, and the use of ultrasonic alerters by teachers proliferated after the Juvenile Delinquency and Prevention Act of 1974. Bayh defended these security measures on the grounds that they would manage “a domestic Vietnam occurring in the hallways and classrooms of America,” but these programs unleashed conditions that made urban schools increasingly resemble the penal facilities where an increasing number of young black men would eventually find themselves. ⁵⁵

In addition to the technological infrastructure established to better supervise young people that, in fact, represented a further criminalization of African American youth, the potentiality clause legitimated the entry of law enforcement officials into the homes of children attending segregated urban schools. In the predominately black neighborhood of Crenshaw, for instance, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Family Treatment Program connected probation officers and social work students to families in conflict with school authorities at local elementary schools. ⁵⁶ If the law enforcement official or counselor observed suspicious or illegal activity during the visit, any family member could be taken into custody. Thus, the increased surveillance and patrol of students spawned a climate that created greater opportunities for arrest, supported the practice of discriminatory expulsions, and severely compromised educational access for low-income youth of color and their families.

The experience of Tim K. illuminates the ways in which the Delinquency Prevention Act changed everyday life for generations of African Americans in palpable and often devastating ways. Tim first encountered local police officers at the age of eight in the fall of 1974, playing on a swing set at his elementary school in South Central Los Angeles one afternoon. Using guidelines stipulated by the recent juvenile delinquency legislation, the patrolmen marked Tim as a “potential delinquent” and arrested him for trespassing at this own school. Rather than deterring Tim from future crime, the preemptive classification he received had the opposite effect. “If that’s the way you’re going to treat me for no reason,” Tim thought during his first ride in the backseat of a patrol vehicle, “I’ll have a reason next time.” ⁵⁷ Less than a year later, without any formal charges or a trial, Tim spent three months in Juvenile Hall, a facility he returned several times during his childhood and adolescence before graduating to juvenile camps and detention centers as a teenager.

In practice, the search for potential delinquents criminalized Tim and other youth for engaging in ordinary childhood activity. As Tim’s immediate reaction to his first apprehension makes clear, preemptive contact with law enforcement authorities often marked the starting point of a much longer criminal and penal history. It seemed the anticipatory strategies of the national crime control program had quickly evolved into the “self-fulfilling prophecy” some law enforcement officials feared. Along with many other low-income black youth who came of age during the War on Crime, Tim’s story suggests that the rise of the carceral state paradoxically intensified violence and imprisonment, the very problems law enforcement officials hoped to prevent.

The Criminalization of Black Youth

The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974 was the centerpiece of the War on Crime, a preemptive national measure that marked Tim and his counterparts as “potential delinquents” and laid the basis for new penal practices and institutions. In recognizing the substandard conditions of most juvenile facilities and the inhumane and all-too-common practice of confining young people with adults, the legislation promoted the construction of new youth detention centers, penal camps, and training schools. It lowered the age threshold for violent crimes so that any sixteen-year-old who the attorney general deemed to be particularly “dangerous to the community” could be tried as an adult. ⁵⁸ Ultimately, the 1974 Act fractured the juvenile justice system so that officials in the Department of Justice disproportionately handled low-income young people of color and officials in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare handled white, middle-income youth. ⁵⁹ When the legislation hit the ground, the same programs that labeled the majority of white youths as “children in trouble” or “runaways” marked black urban children like Tim who engaged in similar activity as “delinquents” or “chronic offenders” and actively promoted their apprehension.

Federal policymakers grew especially concerned about the impact of the crime war in the lives of rural and middle-class young people who increasingly came into contact with the justice system as their parents, too, suffered from infinite and permanent layoffs during the 1970s. ⁶⁰ Significantly, the Act deinstitutionalized status offenses, or crimes that applied only to minors (such as curfew violations and truancy), and encouraged the use of diversion programs, community-based detention, and foster care for nonviolent offenders. Here, Congress retained the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s authority over the aspect of delinquency prevention that policymakers and the public largely associated with white Americans: runaway youth. ⁶¹

Although these delinquency classifications further bifurcated the justice system along racial lines, the constituency of the runaway youth program was the only crime war measure that roughly reflected the gender and racial demographics of the United States in the mid-1970s. Approximately 60 percent of the young people served by the program were women, 73 percent were white, 14 percent were black, and 7 percent were Latino. ⁶² Still, framing the problem as an issue that primarily affected middle-class young people gravely underserved African American and Latino youth who left home on a far more frequent basis than their white counterparts. ⁶³ The federal government exacerbated these discrepancies by funding most of the runaway youth programs in rural areas. In Hamilton, Montana, where the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare established foster home programs, juvenile justice officials surmised the “youth problem” as “not one of hard core delinquents, but rather of acting out youth, vandalism, and, to a much lesser degree, serious crimes such as theft and burglary.” ⁶⁴ With virtually indistinguishable differences between the transgressions of “hard core delinquents” and “acting out youth,” in practice the assessment meant that white youth represented the vast majority of young people sentenced to community-based and alternative detention centers. Of all the youth arrested for status offenses in 1974, for example, 60 percent were white, 30 percent were black, and 10 percent were Latino. ⁶⁵ Like the practice of stop-and-frisk policing in New York City today, the double standard of this ostensibly race-neutral policy was informed by the racist belief that criminality was an innate tendency among black Americans. ⁶⁶

In addition to successfully diverting white youth out of formal court and prison systems and into smaller residential environments, the 1974 Act left the rehabilitative and preventive component of the national juvenile delinquency program largely to the private sector. The policy generated an explosion of privately owned juvenile shelters and community-based custody facilities. ⁶⁷ By 1978, 90 percent of the delinquency prevention programs funded by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare went to private groups, responsible for some 130,000 youth or about a tenth of the population of juvenile offenders detained in public facilities. ⁶⁸ As the number of young people in private custody increased nearly 10 percent between 1975 and 1977, the population of black youth in penal institutions continued to rise. While black youth comprised only one-fifth of all children under private supervision, they amounted to a third of all youth in public facilities. ⁶⁹

By entrusting private and community-based organizations to handle “less seriously delinquent youth,” federal policymakers could focus on groups they felt posed a more serious threat to general public safety. The perception among Ford officials that “most young offenders who commit acts of violence and pursue criminal careers come from minority ghetto and poverty backgrounds” structured the administration’s general approach to crime control and federal juvenile delinquency for the remainder of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. ⁷⁰ “On behalf of the social defense of the citizenry,” Ford officials proclaimed of the administration’s crime control plan, “the few violent youths can be placed in secure institutions for relatively long terms.” ⁷¹ Along these lines, public resources and new federal juvenile enforcement, adjudication, and correctional programs focused on the relatively small number of young people who law enforcement officials felt should be, as the Ford administration frequently put it, “removed from the community” and sentenced to long sentences in prison. ⁷² Hindered by lingering memories of violence from the urban uprisings of the 1960s, federal policymakers infused this category of serious juvenile offender with strong racial undertones.

Yet even as federal policymakers and law enforcement officials turned to penal confinement as the foremost crime deterrent, they also recognized that despite the rehabilitative programs some juvenile detention centers offered, the experience of collective confinement both normalized incarceration and brought criminalized children and teenagers into close contact with one another. This proved true for Tim. After experiencing six years of constant contact with the tangible manifestations of urban programs born from one of the most idealistic domestic enterprises in this nation’s history, by age fourteen, in 1980, Tim no longer feared prison. Instead, incarceration had become “just part of ordinary life.” ⁷³ For Tim and other low-income black youth, the conditions in juvenile prisons propelled recidivism (even Nixon referred to prisons as “colleges of crime”), a dynamic that gave rise to the largest penal system in world history. In California, which today confines more citizens than Britain and Germany combined, Tim has spent much of his adult life going in and out of the state prison system.

The crime control programs of the Reagan administration often serve as the point of origin for the rise of the contemporary carceral state, but early juvenile justice policy enacted in the decade prior to the vaunted takeoff of the War on Drugs illuminates the decades long process that preemptively criminalized urban youth and made mass incarceration possible. Initially, the federal government balanced the resources it allocated to black urban communities by mixing social welfare and law enforcement programs. By the end of the 1970s, when policymakers decided that the crime problem among young black men could not be fixed, social welfare programs were almost entirely phased out in low-income neighborhoods over the course of the following decade. In the absence of a Youth Service Bureau or virtually any fundamental services in a number of critical communities (even directed by law enforcement agencies), police officers emerged as the primary social service providers—offering recreational programs and activities, working with schools, and assisting community groups. ⁷⁴ Even though the Bureaus and other hybrid service agencies died out, police have remained in this capacity. For many low-income communities across the United States today, law enforcement and criminal justice systems are the last public institutions standing.