Crime Wars

Many of us like to think that our scholarship speaks to current concerns. But it’s rare to read a study that addresses fundamentally important issues with such power as Elizabeth Hinton’s fine book. It tells us a great deal about the roots of mass incarceration, the deeply disturbing structure of domination that has 2.17 million Americans imprisoned and more than twice that number under probation and parole, more than 60 percent of them people of color.¹ It does something else as well. Recently we’ve lived through a series of events—from Ferguson to Donald Trump’s election—that have dramatized racism’s enduring power. Still, it’s possible to see those events as aberrations, as many whites do: the overreaction of angry, ill-trained, or panicked cops; the rantings of a man who seems to have no sense of decency. Hinton strips away that illusion by showing us in depressing detail how racist ideas and assumptions permeated policy making in the two decades after Jim Crow’s collapse and, by so doing, institutionalized the injustices that continue to warp the nation. That’s a significant contribution to make in these troubling times.

So it seems a bit churlish—if not ungrateful—to raise a critical question. But here goes. Did the current carceral state really have its origins in the War on Poverty, as Hinton argues?

She makes a compelling case. The War on Poverty rested not on the Johnson administration’s desire “to broadly uplift communities . . . or transform society by combatting inequality,” she writes, but on policy makers’ fear of “urban disorders and . . . the behavior of young people, particularly young African Americans.” (p. 32) The poverty warriors inherited that fear from their predecessors in the Kennedy administration, who had embraced an understanding of African American juvenile delinquency as pathological—a racially charged interpretation that emphasized the behaviors that supposedly cut poor young blacks off from mainstream American society. When Johnson transformed the juvenile-delinquency program into his War on Poverty, the pathological interpretation carried over. From the start, says Hinton, LBJ’s war skirted any effort to reform the structures that sustained inequality in favor of policies meant to change the poor’s behavior.

The urban uprisings of the mid-1960s triggered a punishing turn in the administration’s already truncated approach to urban communities of color. In March 1965, eight months after the first major upheaval in New York, Johnson declared a War on Crime. He followed up with two pieces of legislation. The Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 provided urban police departments with federal funding for experimental training and surveillance programs. The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968—introduced before the rebellions in Newark and Detroit and passed by Congress two months after the nationwide upheavals that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination—dramatically increased funding levels and channeled the money through block grants, a far more open-ended policy that Hinton says marked the arrival of a “punitive counter-revolution that brought to an end roughly three decades of progressive legislation” (133). So her analysis takes an ironic turn. The most illiberal of politics emerged from liberals’ ideas about African American poverty and the policies those ideas helped to shape.

But I’m not convinced that the story runs quite that way. Hinton is correct to stress reformers’ embrace of a pathological model of urban poverty passing from the Kennedy administration’s juvenile-delinquency program to the Great Society. No doubt that model had embedded within it punitive possibilities, a common feature of policies toward the poor at almost any point in the American experience. As Hinton points out, though, Kennedy- and Johnson-era liberals argued that the poor’s pathologies had been created by structural forces. Take the decade’s most egregious example of liberal thinking, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on “The Negro Family.” Moynihan’s argument was completely framed by a highly racialized and gendered version of the pathological model. But he also said that the pathologies he’d revealed were rooted in racial domination, unconscionably high levels of unemployment, and—strikingly—the injustices of...