Elizabeth Kai Hinton

Interesting look at how the war on poverty led to over-policing in African-American areas, but it felt like it was written in the the time it covered, so much so that the epilogue seemed incongruous.

How the feds were involved in the creation of the largest carceral state in the world, starting with antipoverty programs that were funneled at least in part through police/law enforcement structures because that was politically simple. The antipoverty focus faded but the crime control remained. Hinton argues that things like after-school programs overseen by police exposed poor kids, especially poor Black kids, to enhanced surveillance, though she doesn’t actually seem to provide evidence show more that the recordkeeping was such that this really worsened the situation for them. Funding for greater incarceration and moves to longer sentences, by contrast, clearly did. show less

Places the '60s riots in US cities in their historical context of entrenched American racism and updates to the present.

Review from Goodreads:

There is a small window when White House policymakers looked at structural racism with Kennedy and the War on Poverty. They linked crime with economic inequality. But it quickly closed as racial bias set policy and things quickly morphed into punitive crime policy, especially after the riots in 1965.

LBJ began the War on Crime and supported legislation to militarize the police and more police surveillance. We move into Nixon who continued those policies and double-down show more on them. Carter tried to shift a bit more on economic policy on the one hand, but the other, he established more security tactics. Then Reagan and his War on Drugs, which really put the mass incarceration on the fast track. All of this failed, because as a nation, we have not focused on uprooted structural racism and bias that would lead to supporting African-Americans. For example, why set up job training if there are no jobs to go to?

Hinton writes, "Put bluntly, due to its own shared set of assumptions about race and its unwillingness to disrupt the racial hierarchies that have defined the social, political, and economic relations of the United States historically, the bipartisan consensus that launched the punitive intervention did not believe that African Americans were capable of governing themselves." (337)

This book is about policy, so set your reading expectations accordingly, but truly, it is first-rate history. Highly recommend. show less