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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. 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.” 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