Hinton, Elizabeth

From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America

Harvard (Cambridge)

2016

OUR SYNOPSIS: Elizabeth Hinton tells the story of how President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty and War on Crime starting in the mid-1960s developed into the modern American racialized carceral state. As the federal government expanded its social control powers, punitive programs overwhelmed public assistance initiatives. Ultimately, this triumph of crime fighting over anti-poverty measures led directly into the War on Drugs. All these wars were rooted in bipartisan anti-Blackness as backlash against the Civil Rights Movement shifted federal politics to the right. Urban uprisings in the mid to late 1960s accelerated these developments. The ensuing federal policies sought to alleviate white fear by policing, criminalizing, and incarcerating young people in low-income Black urban communities.

BIG QUESTIONS:

Launched at roughly the same time, why was the War on Poverty so drastically overtaken in scale, enthusiasm, and policy by the War on Crime?

FEATURE QUOTES:

“In full historical context, the policies of the Reagan administration marked merely the fulfillment of federal crime control priorities that stemmed initially from one of the most idealistic enterprises in American history during the era of civil rights. Waged over the past half-century, since it emerged from within the War on Poverty and alongside it, this long War on Crime has today positioned law enforcement agencies, criminal justice institutions, and jails as the primary public programs in many low-income communities across the United States.” (4)
“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. The fact that much of the rationale for the War on Crime was based on faulty statistics mattered little to federal policymakers in the end.” (25)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

“Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 12, 1966, The American Presidency Project, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/annual-message-the-congress-the-state-the-union-27.

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