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

Elizabeth Hinton argues that mass incarceration in America did not begin with Ronald Reagan's War on Drugs in the 1980s but originated within the liberal social welfare programs of the 1960s, emerging from a bipartisan consensus shaped by racist assumptions about African Americans, poverty, and crime. The book traces how each presidential administration from Kennedy through Reagan built upon its predecessor's punitive programs, producing a carceral state, a network of police, courts, and prisons, that today confines 2.2 million citizens, a disproportionate number of whom are Black and Latino. Hinton distinguishes this phenomenon from legal scholar Michelle Alexander's characterization of mass incarceration as a "New Jim Crow," arguing instead that the fusion of law enforcement with social welfare programs produced a historically distinct mode of social control.

Hinton begins with the Kennedy administration's antidelinquency programs, which established the federal government's first direct interventions in low-income urban communities. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy created the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime, funding demonstration projects in cities with high concentrations of African Americans. The committee drew on criminologists Lloyd Ohlin and Richard Cloward's "opportunity theory," which held that delinquency stemmed from inadequate social institutions rather than individual traits. In practice, however, the programs targeted the behavior of individual Black youth rather than reforming surrounding institutions. New York City's Mobilization for Youth, the most prominent project, brought social workers into the Lower East Side to provide counseling designed to foster "acceptable" behavior. These programs also introduced "soft surveillance," including coffeehouses staffed by adults who monitored teenagers and gang outreach workers assigned to supervise youth deemed "troublesome."

President Lyndon Johnson expanded Kennedy's framework into the War on Poverty through the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which invested nearly $1 billion in programs including the Job Corps, Head Start, and community action agencies. The act's principle of "maximum feasible participation" briefly opened the door for grassroots organizations to shape antipoverty efforts. Yet the administration rejected direct job creation in favor of training and remedial education rooted in assumptions about Black cultural pathology. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor, circulated his influential report arguing that a "tangle of pathology" in Black urban families produced delinquency, crime, and unemployment. Johnson adopted Moynihan's ideas about Black family dysfunction while rejecting his proposals for federal employment programs. In March 1965, Johnson sent Congress the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, marking the first national investment in local crime control.

The uprising in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in August 1965 accelerated this punitive turn. After a police confrontation with a Black family ignited six days of collective violence, the National Guard joined police in a 16,000-strong force, and more than 4,000 residents were arrested. Rather than examining how excessive police force contributed to the unrest, policymakers concluded that intensified law enforcement was the appropriate response. The federal government retreated from grassroots community action, and Congress slashed funding for independent antipoverty organizations. Johnson signed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act without opposition, and the new Office of Law Enforcement Assistance began dispensing grants for military equipment, helicopters, computerized surveillance systems, and police training programs.

Johnson's Crime Commission, established in 1965 and chaired by Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, developed a blueprint for a national law enforcement program. The commission recommended expanding patrol in Black neighborhoods and creating Youth Service Bureaus, community-based institutions that accepted referrals from police and courts to serve youth labeled as delinquent or potentially delinquent. The commission's director warned that labeling young people this way risked creating "a self-fulfilling prophecy," yet the strategy proceeded. After uprisings in Newark and Detroit in 1967 killed dozens and prompted thousands of arrests, the Kerner Commission warned that the nation was moving toward two separate and unequal societies divided by race, and recommended structural reforms including 2 million new jobs and a guaranteed minimum income. Johnson refused to engage with the report. Instead, he signed the Safe Streets Act of 1968, creating the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), which became the fastest-growing federal agency of the 1970s.

Richard Nixon escalated the War on Crime after taking office in 1969. He disinvested from social welfare programs while using discretionary federal spending to direct crime control resources to Black urban communities. His District of Columbia Court Reorganization Act of 1970 introduced mandatory minimum sentences, preventive detention, and "no knock" raids permitting police to enter homes without a warrant. Most significantly, Nixon ordered the Bureau of Prisons to devise a secret ten-year plan for prison construction based on projections predicting growth in the young Black American population. Between 1970 and 1977, 15 new federal prisons opened; the number of new Black and Latino inmates matched almost exactly the number of new beds. State spending on corrections exploded from $2 million in 1969 to $250 million by 1972.

Hinton traces how new patrol strategies deepened the violence of the crime war. In New York, a plainclothes Anticrime Section patrolled in disguise, producing five times the arrests of uniformed officers but also deadly encounters with residents who did not recognize them as police. Detroit's Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets (STRESS) squad, a plainclothes unit launched with an LEAA grant, killed a young Black man roughly once a month during its first 15 months and eventually shot and killed a Black sheriff's deputy during a mistaken raid. Nixon's Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement, a federal plainclothes force, conducted roughly 1,439 raids, frequently violating the civil liberties of innocent Americans. The Ford administration supported sting operations in which police set up fake fencing businesses, creating underground economies to arrest petty criminals.

The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974 created a bifurcated system for young offenders. The legislation deinstitutionalized status offenses such as truancy and curfew violations, but the benefits flowed primarily to white youth, who received community-based rehabilitation. Black youth, classified as delinquent for identical behavior, faced formal court proceedings and detention. The act defined potential offenders by markers of poverty, including welfare receipt and residence in public housing, granting law enforcement new authority over schools, families, and housing projects.

Under Gerald Ford, the Career Criminal program created an expedited justice system for repeat offenders, producing higher conviction rates and longer sentences. Jimmy Carter attempted to merge crime control with urban policy, dismantling the LEAA while implementing "defensible space" security programs in public housing that installed electronic surveillance, secured lobbies, and metal barriers. These measures deepened surveillance of low-income urban residents without reducing crime.

Reagan brought the War on Crime to its culmination. His Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, reinstated the federal death penalty, eliminated federal parole, and authorized asset forfeiture, a process allowing law enforcement to seize accused criminals' property. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 imposed a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack cocaine, concentrated in Black communities, and powder cocaine, more common among white users. Although white Americans accounted for roughly 70 percent of monthly drug users, Black citizens constituted two-thirds of prisoners serving time for drug possession. In Los Angeles, the LAPD's CRASH antigang unit arrested more than 1,400 predominantly Black residents in a single weekend during Operation Hammer, filing charges against only 32. The Supreme Court's 1987 McCleskey v. Kemp ruling made it virtually impossible to challenge racial bias in sentencing, holding that statistical evidence of disparities was insufficient without proof of individual discriminatory intent.

Hinton concludes that the War on Crime followed a historical pattern of responding to civil rights expansion with punitive measures, from post-Civil War Black Codes, laws restricting Black Americans' freedom and labor, through Jim Crow, the system of legalized racial segregation, to the post-civil rights carceral state. She argues that ending the War on Drugs alone cannot resolve the crisis, since the United States would still house the world's largest penal system even if every person convicted of drug crimes were released. As long as law enforcement remains the primary domestic policy directed at low-income urban communities of color, the cycle of marginalization, isolation, and imprisonment will continue.