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

This is an excellent book that systematically explains the evolution of America's crime control policy in the African American community. Starting with the President Johnson's Great Society programs and anti-poverty initiatives, Hinton traces how these programs which started out dealing with unemployment, social isolation and marginalization as one of the main factors in black poverty and crime but over time morphed into programs that did not support community participation and improvement but rather focused on punitive measures to contain the symptoms of poverty rather than its root cause. The author argues that this change started with the urban uprisings in the 1960's when violence and criminality in the black community began to be viewed as more of a as a cultural pathology inherent within the group of people and their community rather than as a reaction to the desperate situations that many of these communities were in. This is in contrast to the treatment of white poverty especially that in a rural setting which was treated more as a problem that could be overcome with proper assistance rather than just contained and punished. The author argues that once started down this road anti crime measures and the policing of the black community became a kind of self sustaining system as the view of crime in minority communities became to be viewed exclusively as a law enforcement issue from one administration to the next. Even though the programs ( which had hundreds of millions of dollars spent on them never seemed to achieve their goals) successive administrations continued to throw money at them since they viewed them as the only way to contain if not fix the problem of "black criminality" a concept that was a creation of the very programs that the government had created. As I read this I was reminded of the concept of the " self licking ice cream cone": a program or policy that souly exists to combat a problem that it has created and identified. I recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in the history of law enforcement policy or the history of the black community.

Professor Hinton provides a deeply researched examination of how how anti-poverty policies shifted invidiously to a focus on anti-crime without ever tackling the true underlying root causes of crime. Both liberal and conservative leaders participated in a 40+ year history of one miscalculation in policy after anther which led to a quintupling of prison population. Some policies "well-intended", others not, we are only now coming to the realization that massive incarceration, including for many misdemeanors, has been stoking the creation of more crime and a criminalized population alienated from employment opportunity.

The work was thorough, comprehensive and exhaustive in its research. Moreover, it was pleasantly consistent in that. It drew clear lines of distinction in the structure of the tragedy and consequence of embedded racism and how it severely compromised, showing the forces that actively subverted as well, the capacity to approach the objectives of the War on Poverty. This was both disturbing and providing the comfort of knowing how this happened and how it continues to expose the fault lines of America today.

Very well researched book that gives strong evidence of the failure of our country to do anything useful about structural inequality. It's detail can be tedious at times, but that is essential to the thesis.

Ms. Hinton makes a very convincing case to locate baselines for our current mass incarceration strategies. While the threads of the incarceration-industrial complex are nefariously intertwined into our culture, the roots of these coursing networks are framed in our national disgraces: slavery, poverty and and a sustained inequality of power distribution. Ms. Hinton and Ms. Alexander ("The New Jim Crow") are voices that need amplification and reiteration in our society. Both are must reads.

I've been in and around development, mostly international, for over 45 years, and what From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime revealed was a real eye opener for me. I liked that Professor Hinton spreads the blame around to both political parties, all ideological factions and no one escapes unscathed. And, yet, the insanity continues as generation after generation of mostly minority men's lives are sacrificed to the gods' of justice and safety. Read this one and weep, but this is no daytime soap opera.

An interesting and enlightening hypothesis on contemporary american social dynamics

Excellent read on well intended policies that never achieve what they promised. and the politics that drive them.As young woman, Hinton has a very wise and realistic view of society.