From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime Sparknotes Review
FROM THE WAR ON POVERTY TO THE State of war ON CRIME: THE MAKING OF MASS INCARCERATION IN AMERICA
Author: Elizabeth Hinton
Publisher: Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2016. 464p.
Reviewer: Hadar Aviram | January 2017
Information technology is tempting and, to a degree, justifiable, to credit the Nixon campaign and presidency with the explosion of American mass incarceration. Nixon's campaign put crime on the national calendar, resulting in twoscore decades of political posturing and governing through law-breaking. Withal, in recent years, several accounts of mass incarceration—notably past Marie Gottschalk and Naomi Murakawa—take revised this received wisdom, highlighting the role of liberals and progressives in bringing virtually the incarceration crisis.
Elizabeth Hinton'southward new From the State of war on Poverty to the State of war on Crime is a contribution along the aforementioned lines. Like Gottschalk and Murakawa, Hinton sees Nixon's incarceration politics less equally a break from what preceded them and more than as a continuation of a trend. Hinton's business relationship, withal, differs in that she offers a detailed ground level analysis of national crime policy trends, including a thorough political and financial analysis of their contribution to the rise in criminal offence command and in incarceration. Hinton's chief argument is that Lyndon Johnson's declared War on Poverty was far from being the opposite of the State of war on Crime. Rather, both campaigns shared of import assumptions about crime and delinquency, primarily effectually race. Not but was the War on Offense a natural continuation of the War on Poverty forth these lines, but the War on Poverty itself wove together a racialized program of social betterment and a racialized program of supervision and surveillance, which set the phase for later developments.
Hinton'southward analysis of national policy during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies is masterful and valuable. Providing a realistic timeline of reforms, policies, and measures, she makes a convincing instance that concerns most juvenile delinquency by inner-metropolis youths of color were already nowadays in the Kennedy days. Moreover, this concern intensified during the Johnson presidency, and fueled both the neighborhood improvement projects and the early ancestry of surveillance of youth of color who were perceived equally hardened and potential career criminals. Information technology is specially interesting that Hinton focuses on the function played by Cloward and Ohlin, authors of the influential Differential Opportunities Theory, on the formation of these strategies. With Ohlin at the planning captain, neighborhood interventions by benign reformers targeted what was perceived as the pathological single parent black family, introducing external mentors to indoctrinate teenagers in appropriate exploits and vocational opportunities. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, neighborhood youth coming from said pathological families were being followed and supervised, using surveillance projects that were perceived as disconcerting and constitutionally problematic but also effective.
Not quick to let Johnson off the hook past comparison to his presidential successor, Hinton reminds united states of the bland makeup of his Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, equally well every bit for his parting shot, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. Her account of the signing of the Act is more complex and offers more than shades of grayness than the traditional accounts, which villainize Nixon for his 1970 expansion of the Act.
Merely Hinton'south account does not acquit Nixon of responsibility for the exponential growth of the criminal justice apparatus. She provides a deep analysis of the Law Enforcement Help Assistants (LEAA), and especially of its financial implications for urban police force section. Several scholars have commented on the effect of LEAA on urban policing, and by extension, on the criminal justice system, simply never earlier has a conscientious analysis of the funding been conducted. Hinton shows how the focus on improving the capabilities of municipal police departments was designed to target street crime by African American youth.
What follows is a careful assay of the crackdown on juvenile law-breaking every bit an epidemic. It is of particular value today, as we wake up to a rediscovery of childhood, to read Hinton'southward account of how our concept of childhood disappeared in the first place, especially in the context of inner city black youth.
Some other of import contribution of the volume is its placement of the war on drugs. Hinton discusses the Reagan assistants's focus on drugs as a later development, powerfully countering the narrative that the racially discriminatory result of the correctional system has always stemmed from drug enforcement. She mentions the concerns of prior administrations with drugs, merely shows that the focus on urban crime by racial minorities was not particularly focused on drugs until the powerful shift during the early 1980s.
The difficulty in providing critical historical accounts of criminological intervention is in assessing their benevolence. I share Hinton'south apprehension nigh the racialized assumptions made by progressives of the time (her observations dovetail with those recently fabricated by Khalil Gibran Muhammad, though his account also focuses on before historical periods). However, I think that her harshness toward Ohlin and his contemporaries is a flake unwarranted given the context in which they wrote and worked. Cloward and Ohlin adult their theory under the influence of Merton's Strain Theory, the first effort in mainstream American criminology to account for the effect of stratification and inequality in law-breaking. It's piece of cake to see the warts in these theories now, when we are informed by critical and radical criminology, only for their time they were revolutionary and important. While, as Hinton explains, much of the crime picture on which they based their suggestions for intervention was inaccurate and filtered through racist perspectives, not all of their initiatives are deserving of the critique they receive in the book. Maybe, in an effort to right the perception that crime politics are partisan, the volume goes a fleck too far in criticizing reformers who, as Hinton herself carefully notes, had "the best intentions."
Only this is a pocket-sized quibble with an overall of import and informative manuscript, which provides a probing view into the less investigated aspects of the birth of mass incarceration, getting at its very root, and offering all of usa, regardless of our political orientation, a valuable and important mirror for uncomfortable and essential cocky-reflection.
Hadar Aviram, Professor of Police force, Harry and Lillian Hastings Research Chair, Academy of California, Hastings College of the Law, Author, Cheap on Law-breaking: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment
Source: https://clcjbooks.rutgers.edu/books/from-the-war-on-poverty-to-the-war-on-crime-the-making-of-mass-incarceration-in-america/
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