Book Review: From the war on poverty to the war on crime: The making of mass incarceration in America

• Author: Becky Pettit
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016818820574
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Date: 01 December 2020
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Review

Book Review

Hinton, E. (2016).

From the war on poverty to the war on crime: The making of mass incarceration in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press. 449 pp. $18.95, ISBN 9780674737235.

Reviewed by: Becky Pettit, University of Texas–Austin, Austin, TX, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0734016818820574

From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime is a compelling and nuanced modern historical

narrative of mass incarceration. The contemporary plague of over policing and the forced removal of

disproportionate numbers of young Black men from free society, Elizabeth Hinton argues, are rooted

in the designs of federal policy during the height of the Civil Rights era. Policy initiatives cham-

pioned by academics advising the Kennedy and Johnson administrations laid the organizational

infrastructure and cued critical assumptions about “pathological behavior and criminality among

urban African Americans” that made “escalating the War on Crime ...the most practical policy path

forward” (p. 66).

The book begins with a careful review of federal policy initiatives noting that one of the

“essential ironies of American history” is that policies and practices that led to mass incarceration

began “during an era of liberal reform and at the height of the civil rights revolution” (p. 1). The

same Johnson administration that launched the “War on Poverty,” less visibly though arguably more

effectively, also launched a “war against crime” (p. 1). The battle plan from the War on Poverty

proved even more useful for waging the War on Crime. Wide-ranging initiatives centralized the

federal government in the organizational landscape of localities in new ways to ensure voting rights,

children’s access to quality education, and employment and training for young people. At the same

time, policy solutions for urban joblessness and youth delinquency were increasingly li nked to

behavioral explanations rather than structural inequalities. The Law Enforcement Assistance Act

(1965) and the Safe Streets Act of 1968 were thereby enabled to support unprecedented federal

involvement in local police, court, and prison operations. Taken tog ether, Hinton argues, these

federal policy shifts undermined local authority structures and fueled racialized punishment.

Hinton draws on evidence from Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, DC,

and St. Louis to chronicle how people living and working in urban areas contested and complied

with new forms of governance. The specific contours of punishment differed in relation to existing

race relations, economic opportunities, and urban unrest. Yet Hinton paints a broadly consistent

picture that the federal government provided the weapons, technical expertise, and financial support

for localities to wage a sustained campaign against both real and imagined acts of crime and

violence. The Johnson administration laid the groundwork for future criminal justice expansion

by developing strategies to encourage “police forces to actively seek out potential criminals in low-

income urban neighborhoods” (p. 97). Anticipatory, or predictive, policing expanded the carceral

net into adolescence as new forms of state surveillance targeted youth who officials deemed

“delinquents” or otherwise in need of supervision (p. 115).

Criminal Justice Review

2020, Vol. 45(4) 508-509

ª2018 Georgia State University

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