City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 by Kelly Lytle Hernández (review)

In City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965, Kelly Lytle Hernández makes a powerful and compelling argument that the Los Angeles region has been shaped since the Spanish colonial era by a system of selective incarceration. In the years since then, that system's broad outlines have changed very little. Mass incarceration in Los Angeles upheld a system of "labor control and racial subjugation" (9), but, more fundamentally, it reflected the methods of settler colonialism by "purging, removing, caging, containing, erasing, disappearing, and eliminating targeted populations from land, life, and society in the United States" (1). Across six distinct but related chapters, Hernández ties together the fields of labor, immigration, indigenous, and carceral state history to argue that settler colonialism and a criminal justice system built for "mass elimination" (1) have been constant features at the center of Los Angeles and United States history.

Hernández explains in her introduction that the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and Los Angeles Sheriff's Department have destroyed or refused to open almost all of their records about their past activities and their roles in the establishment and maintenance of incarceration in Los Angeles. The author was therefore forced to piece together the causes and effects of human caging by collecting what she refers to as the "rebel archive," the scattered evidence produced by those who opposed the buildup of eliminatory incarceration and who often served as its primary targets. The fragmentary documents produced by and for the various groups slated for elimination helped draw out the clear continuities that run through this history.

Beginning with efforts by Spanish authorities to control and remove the native Tongva/Gabrielino people in the eighteenth century, jailing served as the primary method of maintaining public order, selectively limiting mobility rights, and marking those populations deemed illegitimate by Spanish, Mexican, and United States authorities. By the time the Los Angeles basin passed into the control of Mexico in the 1820s, local authorities pushed the construction of their settler colonial society by seeking to control and remove the indigenous population through the use of public order charges. Public order policing became the simplest method of criminalizing a selected group, whether Tongva during the Spanish period; hobos, Chinese, or Mexicans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; or the growing population of African Americans entering Los Angeles as part of the Great Migration. "Broken windows" policing, which sought to crack down on visible but nonviolent signs of disorder like graffiti and vagrancy and is often associated with the urban "war on crime" crackdowns of the 1980s and 1990s, has a long, oppressive history in Los Angeles, according to Hernández.

Another important theme traced by Hernández is the importance of immigration control for explaining the growth of mass incarceration starting in the late nineteenth century and continuing uninterrupted to the present. The third chapter, in particular, traces the rise of large-scale deportations and a regime of immigrant detention that continues to reside in a gray area of the law. The Geary Act of 1892, which emerged out of fervent anti-Chinese political currents in California, sought to transcend the Chinese Exclusion Act of a decade earlier by forcing all Chinese in the country to register with the federal government and empowering federal officials to arrest and remove any Chinese resident who had entered unlawfully or failed to register. This effort, according to Hernández, bound immigration control more tightly to settler colonial notions, mandating deportation for those deemed illegitimate. The federal courts pulled law enforcement back from the extreme enforcement possibilities built into the Geary Act, but Hernández deftly shows that the landmark Fong Yue Ting and Wong Wing decisions in the 1890s sanctioned deportation as a legitimate mode of enforcing sovereignty. These...