AJPH BOOK & MEDIA Reckoning With the Rise of the Carceral State
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America By Elizabeth Hinton Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2016 449 pp.; $29.95 ISBN-13: 978-0674737235
Mass incarceration has eroded the social, economic, and political landscape of US society in significant ways, taking a disproportionately catastrophic toll on communities of color. Why does the United States have the most expansive and punishing carceral system on the planet? What legal, social, economic, and political factors underlie the prison industrial complex? Elizabeth Hinton’s book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the historical and sociopolitical antecedents of mass incarceration. She delivers a vivid, chronological analysis of federal policymaking from John F. Kennedy through Ronald Reagan that unveils how architects of the New Frontier and Great Society squandered a political opportunity to advance structural reforms to address racial and economic inequalities, and in turn seeded the soil for the carceral state to flourish.
“law and order” or Nixon’s declaration, and Reagan’s acceleration, of the War on Drugs are common starting points. Hinton acknowledges criminalization of drug use, militaristic policing tactics, draconian sentencing laws, overt racial profiling, prison privatization, and explosive construction of correctional facilities that burgeoned under Nixon and Reagan as proximate causes of mass imprisonment and its corrosive aftermath. Yet, she departs from the popular script, covering these topics in the book’s later pages. According to Hinton, rather than a starting line, Reagan’s policies were
THE RISE OF MASS INCARCERATION
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Many scholars, advocates, and policymakers use a common narrative to describe the beginning of the prison boom. Imagery of Barry Goldwater’s call for
200
Book & Media
Cloud
more the outgrowth of a process that liberals themselves had developed within a broad bipartisan political consensus, involving the merger of social welfare and law enforcement programs and the deep commitment to crime control as a viable response to socioeconomic inequality and institutional racism.(p305)
Her opening chapter confronts what is an inconvenient truth for many. Despite signing the landmark civil rights legislation
that put Jim Crow to rest and launching the most progressive social welfare programs in US history, John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society concomitantly erected “the scaffolding for the modern carceral complex.”(p309) Kennedy and Johnson knew that rendering Jim Crow unlawful was not enough on its own to achieve racial equality and social harmony in the near term. Both administrations took historic steps to expand fundamental rights and provide opportunities for those struggling in a sluggish, post–World War II economy that was especially damaging to Black citizens excluded from New Deal social programs. Yet, Hinton uncovers how the most promising aspects of 1960s antipoverty programs were tainted in the earliest stages of implementation by fear and racism, and ultimately replaced with the War on Crime.
WATTS, HARLEM, NEWARK, AND DETROIT Domestic social welfare policymaking took a punitive turn in response to highly publicized protests in Watts, California;
David H. Cloud is with the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, GA. Correspondence should be sent to David H. Cloud, PhD student, Emory University, Rollins School of Public Health, Department of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education, 5th Floor, 1518 Clifton Road, Atlanta, GA 30322 (e-mail: [email protected]). Reprints can be ordered at http://www.ajph.org by clicking the “Reprints” link. This review was accepted November 12, 2016. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2016.303579
AJPH
February 2017, Vol 107, No. 2
AJPH BOOK & MEDIA
Harlem, New York; Newark, New Jersey; and Detroit, Michigan, that instilled a fear of Black revolt in the conscience of white suburbanites, and federal policymakers turned to flawed social science that attributed the symptoms of social unrest to a “tangle of pathology” in Black culture, while discounting the structural forces preserving racial hierarchies and socioeconomic inequalities for answers. Pervasive racial discrimination and police brutality in Black communities sparked violent protests in major cities across the country. Instead of tackling the roots of resentment in Black communities, “policymakers chose to respond to collective violence, however rooted that violence was in civil rights grievances, with greater law enforcement penetration.”(p68)
THE GREAT SOCIETY In subsequent chapters, Hinton dissects how programs, funding streams, and bureaucracies created by Great Society legislation, namely the Law Enforcement Assistance Act and the Safe Streets Act, morphed into engines for expanding militaristic police forces, criminalizing social programs, and removing “generations of young men and women of color from their communities to live inside prisons” by merging social welfare and penal control initiatives.(p335) She explains how, by the time Nixon took office, a federal infrastructure had been established to mobilize his calculated playbook for dramatically increasing the number of jails and prisons nationwide and filling them with impoverished people of color and drug users. Hinton gives concrete
February 2017, Vol 107, No. 2
AJPH
examples of how Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter each recalibrated this same bureaucratic machinery to expand carceral control in communities of color, tailored to their own divergent political rhetoric. Hinton ends the book in the Reagan era, but lights a path for exposing how features of the carceral state seeded in the 1960s expanded and adapted through later transitions of federal power. The metastasis of the prison system that occurred during the Clinton administration via the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 is one place for connecting dots to continue the narrative. Hinton’s masterful critique of the bipartisan, neoliberal contours of the carceral state is an indispensable addition to the literature of other scholars, including Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Naomi Murakawa, Heather Ann Thompson, Douglas Blackmon, and Marie Gottschalk, who trace the origins of mass incarceration to legacies of slavery, racial segregation, and labor exploitation undergirding the ascendance of US capitalism.1–5 The significance of her revelations parallel those of professor and activist Michelle Alexander’s pivotal book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which conveys how the criminal justice system operates as an instrument for systematic discrimination and disenfranchisement in the post–Jim Crow era.6
ENDING MASS INCARCERATION? Momentum has been mounting to address mass
incarceration, with support from across the political spectrum. Hinton’s insights are critical for activists, policymakers, and academics working to downsize the United States’ bloated carceral system, which must include public health leaders committed to abating health inequities through macrosocial change. Hinton’s analysis is a reminder that ending mass incarceration will not come through top-down, technocratic incrementalism that champions cutting recidivism and costs for government, and excludes people closest to the problem in crafting the solutions. It requires a bold vision for the future—a concrete plan for closing jails and prisons and building healthy, thriving communities—an antithesis to Nixon’s “long-range plan.” Government and philanthropic funders must revitalize a commitment to empowering grassroots organizations as primary agents of change, especially those anchored by the leadership of formerly incarcerated individuals who are building a social movement.7 Public health scholars and practitioners should work with these leaders to develop and disseminate strategies for demilitarizing police forces, closing correctional facilities, pursuing drug policies founded on harm reduction, and exposing the economic forces gluing together the prison industrial complex. Public health scholars should continue to develop ecosocial models of disease that incorporate criminalization and incarceration as determinants of population health. Building upon social epidemiology as a theoretical foundation, public health scholars can develop novel policy
solutions that do not shy from challenging the carceral state’s structural roots. The US did not construct its carceral state as a rational response to crime: prison populations soared continuously for decades despite spikes and drops in the crime rate. Its vast expansion is a product of deliberate choices made by people in power, supported by punitive public sentiments, and shaped by histories of slavery, segregation, and racial inequality. Ending mass incarceration will require more than changing sentencing laws and policing practices. As Hinton signals, it will only happen if US society takes seriously the work of ending systemic racism, abating economic inequalities, and improving population health. By providing an astute analysis of the policy choices that led to the construction of the US carceral state, Hinton also points toward a way to dismantle it that starts with reckoning with past failures and making a very different set of choices as a society moving forward. Finally, Hinton’s book reminds us that political promises for social progress can be illusory or euphemisms for exerting penal control. She teaches readers to be mindful of how polices and bureaucracies created in pursuit of social and economic equality are fragile, and vulnerable to being reengineered into institutions of oppression at the changing of the guards. Dreadfully, the 2016 presidential election unmasked how prevalent and virulent the structural forces underpinning the rise in mass incarceration are in the US sociopolitical ecology. It is deeply unsettling to contemplate what the carceral state will look like under the leadership of a president who rode
Cloud
Book & Media
201
AJPH BOOK & MEDIA
a tidal wave of angst, despair, xenophobia, racism, and misogyny into the most powerful office on the globe. Public health leaders, grassroots organizations, and everyone who cares about justice, human dignity, and population health have ethical and moral obligations to fight and prevent history from repeating itself once again. David H. Cloud, JD, MPH REFERENCES 1. Muhammad KG. The Condemnation of Blackness. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press; 2011. 2. Murakawa N. The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press; 2014. 3. Thompson HA. Why mass incarceration matters: rethinking crisis, decline, and transformation in postwar American history. J Am Hist. 2010;97(3): 703–734. 4. Blackmon DA. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II. New York, NY: Doubleday; 2009. 5. Gottschalk M. Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 2016. 6. Alexander M. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press; 2012. 7. JustLeadership USA. Available at: https://www.justleadershipusa.org. Accessed November 21, 2016.
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February 2017, Vol 107, No. 2
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America By Elizabeth Hinton Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2016 449 pp.; $29.95 ISBN-13: 978-0674737235
Mass incarceration has eroded the social, economic, and political landscape of US society in significant ways, taking a disproportionately catastrophic toll on communities of color. Why does the United States have the most expansive and punishing carceral system on the planet? What legal, social, economic, and political factors underlie the prison industrial complex? Elizabeth Hinton’s book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the historical and sociopolitical antecedents of mass incarceration. She delivers a vivid, chronological analysis of federal policymaking from John F. Kennedy through Ronald Reagan that unveils how architects of the New Frontier and Great Society squandered a political opportunity to advance structural reforms to address racial and economic inequalities, and in turn seeded the soil for the carceral state to flourish.
“law and order” or Nixon’s declaration, and Reagan’s acceleration, of the War on Drugs are common starting points. Hinton acknowledges criminalization of drug use, militaristic policing tactics, draconian sentencing laws, overt racial profiling, prison privatization, and explosive construction of correctional facilities that burgeoned under Nixon and Reagan as proximate causes of mass imprisonment and its corrosive aftermath. Yet, she departs from the popular script, covering these topics in the book’s later pages. According to Hinton, rather than a starting line, Reagan’s policies were
THE RISE OF MASS INCARCERATION
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Many scholars, advocates, and policymakers use a common narrative to describe the beginning of the prison boom. Imagery of Barry Goldwater’s call for
200
Book & Media
Cloud
more the outgrowth of a process that liberals themselves had developed within a broad bipartisan political consensus, involving the merger of social welfare and law enforcement programs and the deep commitment to crime control as a viable response to socioeconomic inequality and institutional racism.(p305)
Her opening chapter confronts what is an inconvenient truth for many. Despite signing the landmark civil rights legislation
that put Jim Crow to rest and launching the most progressive social welfare programs in US history, John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society concomitantly erected “the scaffolding for the modern carceral complex.”(p309) Kennedy and Johnson knew that rendering Jim Crow unlawful was not enough on its own to achieve racial equality and social harmony in the near term. Both administrations took historic steps to expand fundamental rights and provide opportunities for those struggling in a sluggish, post–World War II economy that was especially damaging to Black citizens excluded from New Deal social programs. Yet, Hinton uncovers how the most promising aspects of 1960s antipoverty programs were tainted in the earliest stages of implementation by fear and racism, and ultimately replaced with the War on Crime.
WATTS, HARLEM, NEWARK, AND DETROIT Domestic social welfare policymaking took a punitive turn in response to highly publicized protests in Watts, California;
David H. Cloud is with the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, GA. Correspondence should be sent to David H. Cloud, PhD student, Emory University, Rollins School of Public Health, Department of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education, 5th Floor, 1518 Clifton Road, Atlanta, GA 30322 (e-mail: [email protected]). Reprints can be ordered at http://www.ajph.org by clicking the “Reprints” link. This review was accepted November 12, 2016. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2016.303579
AJPH
February 2017, Vol 107, No. 2
AJPH BOOK & MEDIA
Harlem, New York; Newark, New Jersey; and Detroit, Michigan, that instilled a fear of Black revolt in the conscience of white suburbanites, and federal policymakers turned to flawed social science that attributed the symptoms of social unrest to a “tangle of pathology” in Black culture, while discounting the structural forces preserving racial hierarchies and socioeconomic inequalities for answers. Pervasive racial discrimination and police brutality in Black communities sparked violent protests in major cities across the country. Instead of tackling the roots of resentment in Black communities, “policymakers chose to respond to collective violence, however rooted that violence was in civil rights grievances, with greater law enforcement penetration.”(p68)
THE GREAT SOCIETY In subsequent chapters, Hinton dissects how programs, funding streams, and bureaucracies created by Great Society legislation, namely the Law Enforcement Assistance Act and the Safe Streets Act, morphed into engines for expanding militaristic police forces, criminalizing social programs, and removing “generations of young men and women of color from their communities to live inside prisons” by merging social welfare and penal control initiatives.(p335) She explains how, by the time Nixon took office, a federal infrastructure had been established to mobilize his calculated playbook for dramatically increasing the number of jails and prisons nationwide and filling them with impoverished people of color and drug users. Hinton gives concrete
February 2017, Vol 107, No. 2
AJPH
examples of how Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter each recalibrated this same bureaucratic machinery to expand carceral control in communities of color, tailored to their own divergent political rhetoric. Hinton ends the book in the Reagan era, but lights a path for exposing how features of the carceral state seeded in the 1960s expanded and adapted through later transitions of federal power. The metastasis of the prison system that occurred during the Clinton administration via the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 is one place for connecting dots to continue the narrative. Hinton’s masterful critique of the bipartisan, neoliberal contours of the carceral state is an indispensable addition to the literature of other scholars, including Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Naomi Murakawa, Heather Ann Thompson, Douglas Blackmon, and Marie Gottschalk, who trace the origins of mass incarceration to legacies of slavery, racial segregation, and labor exploitation undergirding the ascendance of US capitalism.1–5 The significance of her revelations parallel those of professor and activist Michelle Alexander’s pivotal book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which conveys how the criminal justice system operates as an instrument for systematic discrimination and disenfranchisement in the post–Jim Crow era.6
ENDING MASS INCARCERATION? Momentum has been mounting to address mass
incarceration, with support from across the political spectrum. Hinton’s insights are critical for activists, policymakers, and academics working to downsize the United States’ bloated carceral system, which must include public health leaders committed to abating health inequities through macrosocial change. Hinton’s analysis is a reminder that ending mass incarceration will not come through top-down, technocratic incrementalism that champions cutting recidivism and costs for government, and excludes people closest to the problem in crafting the solutions. It requires a bold vision for the future—a concrete plan for closing jails and prisons and building healthy, thriving communities—an antithesis to Nixon’s “long-range plan.” Government and philanthropic funders must revitalize a commitment to empowering grassroots organizations as primary agents of change, especially those anchored by the leadership of formerly incarcerated individuals who are building a social movement.7 Public health scholars and practitioners should work with these leaders to develop and disseminate strategies for demilitarizing police forces, closing correctional facilities, pursuing drug policies founded on harm reduction, and exposing the economic forces gluing together the prison industrial complex. Public health scholars should continue to develop ecosocial models of disease that incorporate criminalization and incarceration as determinants of population health. Building upon social epidemiology as a theoretical foundation, public health scholars can develop novel policy
solutions that do not shy from challenging the carceral state’s structural roots. The US did not construct its carceral state as a rational response to crime: prison populations soared continuously for decades despite spikes and drops in the crime rate. Its vast expansion is a product of deliberate choices made by people in power, supported by punitive public sentiments, and shaped by histories of slavery, segregation, and racial inequality. Ending mass incarceration will require more than changing sentencing laws and policing practices. As Hinton signals, it will only happen if US society takes seriously the work of ending systemic racism, abating economic inequalities, and improving population health. By providing an astute analysis of the policy choices that led to the construction of the US carceral state, Hinton also points toward a way to dismantle it that starts with reckoning with past failures and making a very different set of choices as a society moving forward. Finally, Hinton’s book reminds us that political promises for social progress can be illusory or euphemisms for exerting penal control. She teaches readers to be mindful of how polices and bureaucracies created in pursuit of social and economic equality are fragile, and vulnerable to being reengineered into institutions of oppression at the changing of the guards. Dreadfully, the 2016 presidential election unmasked how prevalent and virulent the structural forces underpinning the rise in mass incarceration are in the US sociopolitical ecology. It is deeply unsettling to contemplate what the carceral state will look like under the leadership of a president who rode
Cloud
Book & Media
201
AJPH BOOK & MEDIA
a tidal wave of angst, despair, xenophobia, racism, and misogyny into the most powerful office on the globe. Public health leaders, grassroots organizations, and everyone who cares about justice, human dignity, and population health have ethical and moral obligations to fight and prevent history from repeating itself once again. David H. Cloud, JD, MPH REFERENCES 1. Muhammad KG. The Condemnation of Blackness. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press; 2011. 2. Murakawa N. The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press; 2014. 3. Thompson HA. Why mass incarceration matters: rethinking crisis, decline, and transformation in postwar American history. J Am Hist. 2010;97(3): 703–734. 4. Blackmon DA. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II. New York, NY: Doubleday; 2009. 5. Gottschalk M. Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 2016. 6. Alexander M. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press; 2012. 7. JustLeadership USA. Available at: https://www.justleadershipusa.org. Accessed November 21, 2016.
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