Ezra's Bookshelf

From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime

by Elizabeth Hinton · 460 pages · ~8.5 hrs

HistoryRace & IdentityPolitics & Government

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Elizabeth Hinton traces the origins of mass incarceration not to Nixon's war on drugs or Reagan's tough-on-crime policies but to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. She shows how federal programs intended to fight poverty shifted toward surveillance and control of Black communities. Community action programs became intelligence-gathering operations; job training targeted individuals for police attention; social workers collaborated with law enforcement. Hinton documents how policymakers, despite knowing that crime reflected poverty and lack of opportunity, increasingly relied on punitive responses. She traces this through Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan, showing bipartisan embrace of criminalization. The book draws on extensive archival research to reveal how decisions were made and rationalized. Hinton's argument challenges simple partisan narratives while indicting the entire arc of federal policy. The book is essential for understanding how the world's highest incarceration rate developed incrementally through choices that seemed reasonable to those making them. For readers interested in criminal justice reform, this history shows how deeply rooted the carceral state has become.

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