Liberal guilt? The political origins of US mass incarceration
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617724911 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Author | Dominic Aitken |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews for the state of the State Special Issue |
724911TCR0010.1177/1362480617724911Theoretical CriminologyBook reviews
book-review2017
Book reviews for the state of the State Special Issue
Theoretical Criminology
2017, Vol. 21(4) 549 –570
Liberal guilt? The political
© The Author(s) 2017
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origins of US mass
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480617724911
DOI: 10.1177/1362480617724911
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incarceration
Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration
in America, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2016; 464 pp.: 9780674737235, $29.95
(hbk)
Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, Oxford University Press:
New York, 2014; 280 pp.: 9780199892808, $26.95 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Dominic Aitken, University of Oxford, UK
What are the origins of US mass incarceration? As far as politics is concerned, two broad
processes are plausible starting points: the demise of postwar liberalism and, from the
1970s onwards, the ascendance of new right conservatism. Many accounts of contempo-
rary US punishment follow this basic outline but focus almost exclusively on the latter
half, arguing that mass incarceration was driven by a Republican law and order agenda.
The two books under review complicate matters. They tell a longer, more ambiguous
story of the relationship between liberalism and conservatism. These texts move us away
from the familiar cast of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, with their
fiery rhetoric, racial code words and warnings of imminent chaos. Both Elizabeth
Hinton’s (2016) From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass
Incarceration in America and Naomi Murakawa’s (2014) The First Civil Right: How
Liberals Built Prison America argue that the history of mass incarceration is more bi-
partisan than is often acknowledged.
Elizabeth Hinton’s book analyses the federal government’s response to profound
changes in mid-20th-century USA, beginning with postwar economic growth, racial
desegregation and the second great migration of African Americans to northern cities.
Hinton’s account turns on the 1960s civil rights movement and, crucially, a set of
domestic welfare programmes authorized by Democratic Presidents. John F Kennedy
and his successor Lyndon B Johnson were both influenced by liberal social science
research about the ‘cultural’ sources of poverty and a racialized ‘tangle of pathology’ in
urban neighbourhoods. As a result, Kennedy and particularly Johnson embarked on a
‘decisively long-term set of policies’ (2016: 86) to address enduring social problems.
Declaring a ‘War on Poverty’ as part of the Great Society, Johnson passed landmark
legislation such as the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, described by Hinton as ‘the
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most ambitious social welfare program in the history of the United States’ (2016: 50). As
unprecedented efforts were being made to address poverty through federal government
intervention and, in so doing, secure Johnson’s place in history, several crime control
policies, such as the Safe Streets Act of 1968, were also introduced.
Leaving aside the question of whether they were successful or not, Hinton charts how
well-intentioned domestic programmes came under sustained attack from the mid-1960s
onwards. Although some key programmes remained long after Johnson left office, the
political and intellectual foundations of welfare came under renewed pressure following
episodes of urban disorder in the mid-1960s,...
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