Abstract
What are the origins of US mass incarceration? As far as politics is concerned, two broad processes are plausible starting points: the demise of postwar liberalism and, from the 1970s onwards, the ascendance of new right conservatism. Many accounts of contemporary US punishment follow this basic outline but focus almost exclusively on the latter half, arguing that mass incarceration was driven by a Republican law and order agenda. The two books under review complicate matters. They tell a longer, more ambiguous story of the relationship between liberalism and conservatism. These texts move us away from the familiar cast of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, with their fiery rhetoric, racial code words and warnings of imminent chaos. Both Elizabeth Hinton’s (2016) From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America and Naomi Murakawa’s (2014) The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America argue that the history of mass incarceration is more bi-partisan than is often acknowledged.
Elizabeth Hinton’s book analyses the federal government’s response to profound changes in mid-20th-century USA, beginning with postwar economic growth, racial desegregation and the second great migration of African Americans to northern cities. Hinton’s account turns on the 1960s civil rights movement and, crucially, a set of domestic welfare programmes authorized by Democratic Presidents. John F Kennedy and his successor Lyndon B Johnson were both influenced by liberal social science research about the ‘cultural’ sources of poverty and a racialized ‘tangle of pathology’ in urban neighbourhoods. As a result, Kennedy and particularly Johnson embarked on a ‘decisively long-term set of policies’ (2016: 86) to address enduring social problems. Declaring a ‘War on Poverty’ as part of the Great Society, Johnson passed landmark legislation such as the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, described by Hinton as ‘the most ambitious social welfare program in the history of the United States’ (2016: 50). As unprecedented efforts were being made to address poverty through federal government intervention and, in so doing, secure Johnson’s place in history, several crime control policies, such as the Safe Streets Act of 1968, were also introduced.
Leaving aside the question of whether they were successful or not, Hinton charts how well-intentioned domestic programmes came under sustained attack from the mid-1960s onwards. Although some key programmes remained long after Johnson left office, the political and intellectual foundations of welfare came under renewed pressure following episodes of urban disorder in the mid-1960s, particularly the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles and 1967 uprisings in Detroit, Newark and elsewhere. These dramatic social conflicts had their origins in profound economic disadvantage, police brutality and racial segregation, all of which were highlighted again in 1968 with riots following Martin Luther King’s assassination. The coincidence of widespread urban disorder, rising crime and increased opposition to the escalating Vietnam War left the Johnson administration feeling it was ‘under attack from within’ (2016: 106). Despite the socio-economic sources of urban disorder, Johnson remained convinced that crime was rooted in cultural deficits and social pathology. With support for the War on Poverty weakening, Johnson and those around him began to focus more on the crime control functions of social welfare programmes, asserting that the first duty of government is to preserve peace and order.
Later in the 1960s and thereafter, civil rights legislation and welfare policies began to be accused of causing, rather than responding to, social unrest. Civil rights were seen by some as criminogenic, with racial integration a catalyst for disorder, particularly in northern cities. Emerging forms of knowledge such as crime statistics cemented a dubious association between crime, urban poverty and race. In these pessimistic circumstances, which worsened in the following decades, federal policymakers ‘decided to manage the criminal symptoms of poverty and inequality’ (2016: 95) while doing little to address their root causes.
Hinton argues that this combination of demographic change and disorder loosened the grip of liberal welfarism. The slow transformation of social policy and an expanded state helped create ‘a new and historically distinct phenomenon in the post-civil rights era: the criminalization of urban social programs’ (2016: 25–26). Welfare programmes were captured and repurposed by evermore punitive approaches to social problems, mediated by a set of ideas about how poverty and crime reflect individual failures rather than structural injustice.
By the time Richard Nixon entered office in 1969, the ‘modern carceral state had begun to take hold’ (2016: 62). Although Hinton does not explicitly conceptualize the state, her account suggests that the US state had begun to penetrate the daily lives of black Americans in many major cities, as she shows in her discussions of Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit and Los Angeles. Surveillance activities were embedded in the professional routines of social workers and teachers, and driven forward by increasingly militarized and aggressive policing. According to Hinton, the Nixon Administration consciously intensified the punitive side of urban social programmes, and in so doing ‘successfully established the institutional framework that set the US on the road to mass incarceration’ (2016: 177). It is no coincidence that the racial composition of prisons began to change markedly in the 1970s, as young African Americans struggled to access quality housing, employment and education. Although Ronald Reagan’s ‘War on Drugs’ and Bill Clinton’s ‘War on Crime’ later exacerbated these problems, Hinton reminds us that when Reagan took office in 1981, ‘he inherited the largest law enforcement system in the world, one that had been in development since the mid-1960s’ (2016: 307).
Hinton’s survey of the interaction of welfare and urban crime control in the second half of the 20th century is a powerful illustration of unintended consequences and political capture. Welfare liberalism was accused of futility and perversity, at best failing to address social problems and often making them worse. State social programmes provided a vehicle for stigmatizing and labelling African Americans. In this respect, Hinton conceives of mass incarceration as a path dependent sequence, highlighting important continuities where other scholars have pointed to decisive policy shifts. Hinton’s argument that the expansion of the carceral state ‘should be understood as the federal government’s response to the demographic transformation of the nation at mid-century, the gains of the African American civil rights movement, and the persistent threat of urban rebellion’ (2016: 11) is broadly persuasive. By blending ideas, individuals and events, Hinton provides a timely corrective to the idea that US mass incarceration can be explained solely in terms of a conservative law and order agenda.
Could we push the argument further and claim that liberals were willing co-authors of mass incarceration? The subtitle of Naomi Murakawa’s book, How Liberals Built Prison America, gives a sense of her bold, theoretically ambitious argument. This revisionist account of postwar federal crime politics notes that liberals are too often omitted from standard accounts of mass incarceration, assumed to be the benign opponents of punitive Republicans. Rather than view mass incarceration as a conservative ‘backlash’ against the liberal civil rights movement, Murakawa argues that liberals have long shored up racialized criminal justice. Indeed, the very terms that frame the debate—liberal versus conservative, welfare versus punishment, northern racial progress versus southern racial atavism—are dubious.
Murakawa develops a sophisticated argument about liberals’ contribution to the emergence of the ‘civil rights carceral state’ (2014: 13), beginning with ‘postwar racial liberalism’. This ideology is described as ‘the historically grounded understanding of the American race “problem” as psychological in nature, with “solutions” of teaching tolerance and creating color-blind institutions’ (2014: 11). Rather than view racism as a pervasive feature of US society, postwar racial liberals regarded it as a set of irrational individual prejudices, ultimately a psychological defect rather than a political problem. Solutions to racial injustice therefore lay in depersonalizing state power to minimize discretion and bias, not in more transformative ideas about racial equality.
The book illustrates postwar racial liberalism with extensive discussions of calls for standardized sentencing, police professionalization and improved death penalty administration. Arguing that liberal race neutrality facilitated punitive policy, Murakawa notes three ‘perils’ of liberal law and order: ‘its potential to entrench notions of black criminality, to fuel carceral state-building, and to fortify the legitimacy of the carceral state’ (2014: 13). It was, she argues, a ‘sensibility of racial pity and administrative quality’ (2014: 13), which obscured racial power ‘through vocabularies of bland administrative reform and soft racial paternalism’ (2014: 12). Racial liberalism became deeply embedded in the state, so much so that it appeared naturally given rather than historically contingent.
Understanding racism as irrational prejudice had numerous adverse effects for African Americans in the post-civil rights period. Liberals decried lawless state violence, especially unregulated police brutality and the original sin of southern lynching. They viewed the criminal justice system as ‘weak, dated, and disorganized’, needing to be ‘strengthened, updated, and reorganized’ (2014: 85). But these formalist critiques of law enforcement were silent when it came to a vastly expanded, more rationally administered, penal state. With a ‘singular faith’ that federal government could ‘correct racial ills through better machinery’ (2014: 74), liberals left open the possibility of consistent and predictable severity in US punishment. Liberals’ idea of fairness was thus anchored in formality and procedural minutiae, with little to say about prison conditions, the scale of punishment or other substantive outcomes. In these and other ways, Democrats ‘aided, abetted, and legitimated a punitive law-and-order regime’ (2014: 99).
Murakawa’s book is a thought-provoking account of federal crime politics, with much of interest to say about the origins of mass incarceration. The author’s willingness to challenge comforting myths and pose new questions is partly why the book is so rewarding, but its counter-intuitive perspective has its limitations. Three problems stand out.
First, the parameters of Murakawa’s thesis are ambiguous. The book’s subtitle, How Liberals Built Prison America, presents the argument at its strongest, but the word choice varies throughout the text. For instance, liberals are said to have ‘legitimated state-based racial violence’ (2014: 90), ‘propelled carceral development’ (2014: 26) and ‘invited’ administrative perfection of the death penalty (2014: 25). Such equivocation is especially confusing in light of the following caveat in the opening chapter: ‘[a]ccounts of conservative backlash are not wrong; rather, I believe that they are so overwhelmingly persuasive that they eclipse the specificity of racial liberalism against which they respond’ (2014: 8). The vagaries of political history do not always allow us to say definitively who caused what, so some uncertainty is to be expected. But Murakawa’s originality lies in identifying postwar racial liberals as co-authors of mass incarceration, so readers would benefit from greater clarity on this issue. It remains an open question whether it is fair to say liberals ‘propelled’ or ‘built’ US punishment if their efforts were merely misdirected or if they placed too much faith in the otherwise sensible idea of consistency.
Whatever the extent of Murakawa’s thesis, a more prosaic problem is that the evidence used cannot explain the full variety of US punishment. Any grand narrative of mass incarceration must attend to the USA’s complex web of criminal justice systems, with significant autonomy at the state and local levels, reflected in variable rates of imprisonment throughout the country. The regional, state and local idiosyncrasies of the US penal system are well documented, yet Murakawa’s language often conceals such details by referring to undefined, monolithic concepts such as ‘carceral machinery’ (2014: 111), ‘state-sanctioned racial violence’ (2014: 147) and ‘carceral neoliberalism’ (2014: 151).
The idea of ‘the state’ in political theory is notoriously elusive, and this is reflected to some extent in Murakawa’s account, which is at times unclear about precisely who did what, why and how. The author paints a disturbing picture of the state as an ever-expanding entity that is unthinkingly legitimized by a liberal political class. However, the focus on elite-level federal politics often feels distant from the visceral local threats that many Americans faced in the form of lethal violence, robbery and the drug trade. Unlike Hinton’s textured discussion of how the state filtered into the everyday experience of many Americans, Murakawa’s argument is predicated on a more abstract conception of the state and its power. The author acknowledges that the federal prison system is in fact a ‘relatively small’ part of the overall picture, despite its ‘hefty symbolic weight’ (2014: 21). But this note of caution is not mirrored in the book’s conclusions. The phrasing is at times sweeping and totalizing, for instance the claim that while ‘the Big House may serve racial conservatism’, it was ‘built on the rock of racial liberalism’ (2014: 151). None of which is to detract from the thrust of the arguments, only to say that the book would be no less valuable if qualifications were drawn throughout.
A final, theoretical criticism relates to the implicit counterfactual argument that runs through the text. Murakawa, it is fair to say, takes a dim view of postwar racial liberalism. She is especially unimpressed by its preoccupation with rational administration, colour-blind neutrality and sanitized state power. Liberals, the argument runs, did not go far enough in addressing racial injustice and were often complicit in making matters worse. With hindsight, it seems obvious that a more ambitious liberal agenda would have been preferable. Yet Murakawa also stresses that intentions do not guarantee outcomes. If we put these two thoughts together, the counterfactual argument that liberals should have done more is not so straightforward.
Suppose that postwar racial liberals had provided a more root-and-branch critique of white supremacy. They demanded reparations for African Americans, asserted their distrust of the state and construed criminal justice as an extension of a wider system of racial subordination. What would have protected these well-meaning ideas from the law of unintended consequences, which both Hinton and Murakawa show so convincingly? We can only speculate about what would have happened, but no political strategy is all reward and no risk. Given how difficult it was to sustain support for welfare policies aimed at the ‘deserving poor’, as Hinton shows, how likely is it that a critique of criminal justice, home of the ‘undeserving’, would have been endorsed by voters in a period of high crime and social conflict? Surely such ideas would have been ruthlessly misrepresented and parodied, another example of government creating perverse incentives for amoral behaviour, even worse than the welfare state. The idea of the state may have been further politicized and some of its more positive influence limited in the process.
The difficulties of sustaining broad political coalitions in a country as big and diverse as the USA, and the longer arc of postwar liberal demise, suggest that such an approach would have been riddled with problems. Perhaps this alternative would have been less likely to legitimize a prison boom or at least moderated some punitive excesses. But if liberals had failed to connect with voters, they would have risked total conservative domination of the crime question. The US state’s extraordinary capacity to contain, control and imprison large swathes of its population may have been even greater. Had that occurred, and given law and order conservatives greater room for manoeuvre as their opponents foundered, would it still have been worth it? Just as we should not look back at postwar racial liberalism through rose-tinted glasses, nor should we presume that alternatives to it were obvious. If there is one thing that both books show it is that, as political matters, crime and punishment are far from simple.