From the War on Poverty to the War on..., Elizabeth Hinton
1 Rating(s)
List: $20.49 | Sale: $14.34
Club: $10.24

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

Narrator: Josh Bloomberg

Unabridged: 13 hr 9 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/06/2016


Synopsis

In the United States today, one in every thirty-one adults is under some form of penal control, including one in eleven African American men. How did the "land of the free" become the home of the world's largest prison system? Challenging the belief that America's prison problem originated with the Reagan administration's War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society at the height of the civil rights era. Johnson's War on Poverty policies sought to foster equality and economic opportunity. But these initiatives were also rooted in widely shared assumptions about African Americans' role in urban disorder, which prompted Johnson to call for a simultaneous War on Crime. The 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act empowered the national government to take a direct role in militarizing local police. Federal anticrime funding soon incentivized social service providers to ally with police departments, courts, and prisons. Under Richard Nixon and his successors, welfare programs fell by the wayside while investment in policing and punishment expanded. "The book is vivid with detail and sharp analysis. Stretching beyond the typical scope of an academic text, Hinton's book is more than an argument; it is a revelation." ---New York Times

Reviews