The Carceral State’s Origins, from Above and Below

Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime is one of the most important books on public policy in the American twentieth century that I have read in a very long time. It rearranges how we understand the chronological and ideological foundations of America’s mass-incarceration epidemic, casting America’s punitive project as one of liberal origins and extended bipartisan development, and demonstrating how that project has been bound up in antiblack logics and ideologies from the beginning. If Khalil Muhammad’s masterful The Condemnation of Blackness several years ago sketched out how ideas about crime and blackness became rooted in the public consciousness during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Hinton’s book shows those ideas coming home to roost in civil rights–era federal crime policy.¹ It is an essential book for any historian or policy maker who wishes to better understand the nature of the postwar American state. It is especially critical for those of us who are concerned with the contours, consequences, and state responses to the heavily racialized and uniquely devastating postwar “urban crisis.”²

This is a harrowing book. It demonstrates with unflinching clarity the many ways that America’s turn toward punitive politics and mass incarceration has not made our lives any safer—especially not the lives of those most vulnerable to both punishment by the state and violence in their communities. Hinton’s point that the waging and escalation of the War on Crime and its various spinoffs was awful public policy—a point made tacitly throughout and oftentimes explicitly—won’t generate any headlines. But beyond its being terrible policy, she also powerfully and persuasively argues that many of those who were prosecuting it at the time simply didn’t care that it was bad policy. As she writes in closing her introduction, “The federal policies described in this book escalated both violence and imprisonment but failed to prevent crime and improve public safety. What is remarkable is that these policies’ lack of success seemed fundamentally irrelevant to national, state, and local officials as those officials prosecuted the War on Crime.” (25) Indeed, violent crime in America worsened steadily for two decades after the launch of the War on Crime. And whether that’s causal or correlative, it is not an endorsement of the project’s social utility.

If officials chose to ignore the fact of their policies’ failures, it was hardly the only deleterious choice they made. One of the unspoken organizing mechanisms of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime is a chronicling of choices made (and forewent) by those who govern our society. Throughout, we see the paths that policy makers chose, and are shown (or can easily imagine) those that they did not. Hinton captures the federal government and its state and local partners at a prolonged crossroads moment, with the urban crisis hammering away at American cities generally and at the economic foundations of its black and brown pockets, especially. As concentrated poverty and cumulative disadvantage deepened across wide swaths of the urban environment, policy makers considered how to reckon with it.³ We live with their reckonings to this day. As the book’s title suggests, the federal government rapidly abandoned its always-tenuous commitment to meaningful urban social welfare (a “War on Poverty”), and chose first to augment and then replace it wholesale with a war on the black and brown poor (a “War on Crime”). Within a decade of its inauguration in 1965, support for the War on Poverty had disappeared almost entirely. Simultaneously, support for the War on Crime crescendoed. By the time Ronald Reagan came into office in 1980, federal priorities were already heavily punitively oriented. Reagan inherited a robust and well-funded anticrime apparatus which he used to launch his War on Drugs, in which he married federal funds and law-and-order ideologies with the imperatives of local and state law enforcement.

The impacts of these twinned choices—less social welfare, more social punishment—upon the fabric of American society were profound. Instead of...