In the United States today, one in every 31 adults is under some form of penal control, including one in 11 African American men. How did the "land of the free" become the home of the world's largest prison system? Challenging the belief that America's prison problem originated with the Reagan administration's War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society at the height of the civil rights era.
Johnson's War on Poverty policies sought to foster equality and economic opportunity. But these initiatives were also rooted in widely shared assumptions about African Americans' role in urban disorder, which prompted Johnson to call for a simultaneous War on Crime. The 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act empowered the national government to take a direct role in militarizing local police. Federal anticrime funding soon incentivized social service providers to ally with police departments, courts, and prisons. Under Richard Nixon and his successors, welfare programs fell by the wayside while investment in policing and punishment expanded.
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President Johnson's "War on Poverty" speech was delivered at a time of recovery (the poverty level had fallen from 22.4% in 1959 to 19% in 1964 when the War on ...
The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration. American politicians are now eager to disown a failed criminal-justice system that’s left the U.S ...
The New Press mourns the loss of Edward J. Davis, counsel to The New Press, partner at the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine LLP and, most importantly, dear friend and ...
Has the War on Poverty been a failure? Well, of course it has. If you devote 50 years and $21.5 trillion (in 4Q2013 dollars) to anything, and people are ...
Racism and Discrimination; Hillary Clinton; Feature; February 29, 2016 Issue; Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote From the crime bill to ...
"The War on Drugs" is an American term commonly applied to a campaign of prohibition of drugs, military aid, and military intervention, with the stated aim being to ...
America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, outstripping even Russia, Cuba, Rwanda, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Though America is home to only ...
A scientific study of rich and poor black and white youth in the US has definitively smashed the excuse used by nonwhite apologists that poverty “causes ...
Fifty years after it began, the initiative has brought America to a crossroads Fifty years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson called for a “War ...
The New Jim Crow is a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked ...
