Abstract
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime is a compelling and nuanced modern historical narrative of mass incarceration. The contemporary plague of over policing and the forced removal of disproportionate numbers of young Black men from free society, Elizabeth Hinton argues, are rooted in the designs of federal policy during the height of the Civil Rights era. Policy initiatives championed by academics advising the Kennedy and Johnson administrations laid the organizational infrastructure and cued critical assumptions about “pathological behavior and criminality among urban African Americans” that made “escalating the War on Crime…the most practical policy path forward” (p. 66).
The book begins with a careful review of federal policy initiatives noting that one of the “essential ironies of American history” is that policies and practices that led to mass incarceration began “during an era of liberal reform and at the height of the civil rights revolution” (p. 1). The same Johnson administration that launched the “War on Poverty,” less visibly though arguably more effectively, also launched a “war against crime” (p. 1). The battle plan from the War on Poverty proved even more useful for waging the War on Crime. Wide-ranging initiatives centralized the federal government in the organizational landscape of localities in new ways to ensure voting rights, children’s access to quality education, and employment and training for young people. At the same time, policy solutions for urban joblessness and youth delinquency were increasingly linked to behavioral explanations rather than structural inequalities. The Law Enforcement Assistance Act (1965) and the Safe Streets Act of 1968 were thereby enabled to support unprecedented federal involvement in local police, court, and prison operations. Taken together, Hinton argues, these federal policy shifts undermined local authority structures and fueled racialized punishment.
Hinton draws on evidence from Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and St. Louis to chronicle how people living and working in urban areas contested and complied with new forms of governance. The specific contours of punishment differed in relation to existing race relations, economic opportunities, and urban unrest. Yet Hinton paints a broadly consistent picture that the federal government provided the weapons, technical expertise, and financial support for localities to wage a sustained campaign against both real and imagined acts of crime and violence. The Johnson administration laid the groundwork for future criminal justice expansion by developing strategies to encourage “police forces to actively seek out potential criminals in low-income urban neighborhoods” (p. 97). Anticipatory, or predictive, policing expanded the carceral net into adolescence as new forms of state surveillance targeted youth who officials deemed “delinquents” or otherwise in need of supervision (p. 115).
After developing the core argument, Hinton chronicles dimensions of crime control policy at the federal level from the Nixon through the Reagan administrations. By most accounts, Nixon was unflinchingly punitive. One of his enduring legacies was the selective abandonment of “New Federalism” when it came to crime control and enforcing strategies that maintained a “highly repressive” level of federal intervention in urban neighborhoods (p. 137). Coupled with the dismantling of anti-poverty programs, heightened policing supported by Nixon entrenched racialized accounts of poverty and criminality. The Ford administration (pp. 233–236) institutionalized racism in the juvenile justice system through the expansion of school-based surveillance. Carter, although generally viewed as more progressive, reinforced collaborations between police and social service agencies that heightened surveillance activities in segregated urban neighborhoods. Carter’s programs, Hinton argues, “laid the groundwork for the privatization, the deregulation, and the ‘War on Drugs’ pursued by his successor” (p. 281). The Reagan administration “exacerbated the tendency within federal crime control programs to reinforce crime in the low-income African American communities that had been the main targets for punitive intervention” (p. 307).
Although the 1960s is a familiar decade for scholars of American policing and punishment and I suspect few would be surprised to learn of the centrality of the passage of Law Enforcement Assistance Act (1965) and the Safe Streets Act (1968) for ensuing decades of criminal justice expansion, there is much more to learn from a careful read of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime. Hinton makes an incredibly powerful and empirically well-supported argument that the organizational landscape and philosophical underpinnings of anti-poverty policies were essential for the passage and diffusion of new forms of American crime control. The close coupling of supportive services and policing “introduced new forms of supervision—what could be seen as soft surveillance—in targeted urban areas” (p. 45). Excessive policing and punishment were thought to be necessary to reign in increasingly insurgent forces ignited by civil rights mobilization and new forms of community-based activism. Civil unrest was met with overwhelming police presence and criminal punishment was viewed as an increasingly socially acceptable sanction supported by federal funds and presidential rhetoric. Mass incarceration in its contemporary form is thus intimately tied to the political machinations of Kennedy and Johnson. Later administrations built on this foundation in more or less deliberate ways to craft a uniquely American approach to criminal justice that targets urban Blacks whose primary shortcoming—through no fault of their own—is lack of opportunity.
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime is a well-written and cogently argued book of broad relevance for scholars, students, and laypeople interested in the historical roots of contemporary criminal justice policy and practice. Mass incarceration is not the result of a collection of individual failings or behavioral pathology. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime shows how a coordinated federal strategy contributed to racialized crime control. Despite decades of declines in crime, the United States maintains stubbornly high incarceration rates and Black men continue to face disproportionately high levels of surveillance, prosecution, and incarceration. Highly visible acts of police violence, courts and corrections crippled by overcrowding, and a growing awareness of the widespread costs of mass incarceration emphasize the urgency of reform. Hinton’s book reminds us there is a pivotal role for the federal government to play in redressing the racial injustices wrought by punitive crime control policy.