The Long and Devastating Reach of Federal Crime-Control Policies

Elizabeth Hinton has written a searing expose of the use of federal, especially executive, power from the 1960s through the 1980s to create a prison nation in the United States. With its vast scope and sweeping arguments, it’s the kind of book that upends prevailing accounts and opens up broad new territory for future research. Her study raises many new questions in a host of subfields, and it’s likely to catalyze many dissertations.

Hinton argues that we have not been looking in the right place to understand the so-called white backlash to civil rights struggles, or what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has more recently termed a “counteroffensive.” Numerous books and articles have been written on opposition to busing or school desegregation; on efforts to dilute, gerrymander, or suppress the right to vote; on racism within unions in auto and steel plants as well as railroads; on the myriad campaigns against affirmative action. Think of the many studies of housing riots, whites-only suburbanization, and predatory lending. For sure, many scholars have written about the criminal (in)justice system and police brutality and violence. But Hinton shifts our gaze in seismic fashion. She uncovers and narrates an extraordinary story of revanchist penal policy—aimed overwhelmingly at black men and youth—that moved to the forefront of federal, state, and local governance in the 1960s and subsequent post–civil rights era.

This study is clearly inspired by the age of mass incarceration and the many struggles against it. Hinton’s work illustrates what we might term the benefits of presentism—the ways in which contemporary developments push historians to ask new questions of the past. And these new questions lead to new sources and new interpretations. Hinton’s method and argument is somewhat counterintuitive to historians: she downplays change over time and differences between Democrats and Republicans to show instead a long continuity of racist public policy and reliance on police and prisons to solve, contain, or mask social problems. She finds a bipartisan consensus in the postwar era that blackness, especially black maleness, equals criminality and therefore must be policed, disciplined, and ultimately confined. In many respects, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime reads like a compendium of evidence for the prosecution of the United States in an international human-rights tribunal. This book should be required reading for those interested in making a case for post-slavery reparations by the United States government to African Americans. Indeed, the information in the “Juvenile Injustice” chapter alone details the creation of policy, based on racial identification, aimed at depriving individuals of their rights. Like Te Nehisi Coates’s writings about racial exploitation in the housing market, From the War on Crime to the War on Poverty is part of a tabulation of culpability that helps build a greater understanding of both the federal government’s role in creating and perpetuating racial inequality in the past half century and the need, as a result, to contemplate reparatory justice. Thus, Hinton’s study reflects both the era of mass incarceration and the recent surge of interest in exploring government culpability for racial harms.

Hinton’s study offers a new account of both mass incarceration and the War on Poverty and other Great Society programs. Previous scholars have critiqued Kennedy- and Johnson-era liberalism, especially its focus on readying the “disadvantaged” individual for entry into the otherwise-sound school system or workplace, as inferior to the job-creation impulse of the New Deal, with its focus on the flaws of the economy rather than individuals. Hinton shares this view, finding that “the Kennedy and Johnson administrations aimed to change the psychological impact of racism within individuals rather than the impact of the long history of racism within American institutions.” In addition, Hinton contends that the chief problem of Kennedy- and Johnson-era consultants and policy makers was their deep-seated belief in black incapacity for self-governance. This sense of damaged black youth helped forge the way toward crime control as the solution to the “Negro problem.” In the first few chapters, Hinton...