How liberals put black America behind bars: a surprising new history about race and prison.

• Author: Russell, Thaddeus
• Position: The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America - Book review

The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, by Naomi Murakawa, Oxford University Press, 280 Rages, $24.95

THE UNITED STATES is the undisputed world champion of incarceration. According to the latest accounting by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, close to 2.3 million adults are held in federal and state prisons and county jails in the United States, which is roughly 1 percent of the country's adult population and 25 percent of the world's prisoners. The U.S. incarcerates a greater percentage of its total population than any other country in the world, including Cuba, Russia, Iran, and, according to some estimates, North Korea. In addition, 4.8 million Americans are on probation or parole, which means that a total of more than 7 million are under correctional control--some 3 percent of the adult population in the United States. Nearly 60 percent of prisoners are black or Latino and roughly half of all prisoners are serving sentences for nonviolent offenses.

Conventional wisdom holds that mass incarceration of American blacks and Latinos is a result of the "scientific racism" that was established as the dominant racial ideology in the 19th and early 20th centuries and which underlay the Republican "law and order" policies of the 1970s that brought us to our present condition. But in her new book, The First Civil Right, Naomi Murakawa upends that narrative, locating the roots of America's "prison state" instead in the progressive reformism that gained ascendancy during World War II. Progressive thinkers overthrew scientific racism as a respectable belief system and replaced it with a set of ideas that were modern and sophisticated but also a more effective rationale for locking up large portions of the population. What Murakawa calls "racial liberalism" was born out of the discourse of ethnic and racial "tolerance" and "equality," which promised liberation but contained a carceral logic.

In prewar America, it was entirely respectable to believe that black people were biologically inferior and inherently prone to criminal behavior. Students in elite universities were assigned Ulrich Bonnell Philips' American Negro Slavery, the leading scholarly text on the subject through the first half of the 20th century, which argued that the plantations were "the best schools yet invented for the mass training of that sort of inert and backward people which the bulk of the American negroes represented." Policy makers and intellectuals generally accepted as fact the claim made in Frederick Hoffman's The Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro that "crime, pauperism, and sexual immorality" among blacks were biologically determined. Scientific racism was even extended to many Europeans. The National Origins Act, which severely restricted immigration from southern and eastern European countries as...