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skylit's review
4.0
Good book on learning how we came to have the policing system we do today. There were many moments in history where things could've been shaped differently if not for the poor statistic gathering and innate racial bias.
chasrotramel2024's review
5.0
I am a youth service professional and the CEO of a youth-serving non-profit. This is the very best book I have read on the era of mass incarceration. Elizabeth Hinton has written the seminal history of our time and has connected the dots on all of the policy and political decisions that created our current situation where more people are incarcerated today than at any time in the history of the world. It gets to the heart of poverty, race, and class in America. This book is an essential text for everyone living in the United States today. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Please read this book. Immediately.
terpgirl42's review
4.0
Great information and well written, but with work ramping back up I struggled to focus, and didn’t have the time to take it slow (library book with a looming due date.) I’m planning to read it again.
bryan8063's review
5.0
Professor Hinton has written an important work here.
There is a small window when White House policymakers looked at structural racism with Kennedy and the War on Poverty. They linked crime with economic inequality. But it quickly closed as racial bias set policy and things quickly morphed into punitive crime policy, especially after the riots in 1965.
LBJ began the War on Crime and supported legislation to militarize the police and more police surveillance. We move into Nixon who continued those policies and double-down on them. Carter tried to shift a bit more on economic policy on the one hand, but the other, he established more security tactics. Then Reagan and his War on Drugs, which really put the mass incarceration on the fast track. All of this failed, because as a nation, we have not focused on uprooted structural racism and bias that would lead to supporting African-Americans. For example, why set up job training if there are no jobs to go to?
Hinton writes, "Put bluntly, due to its own shared set of assumptions about race and its unwillingness to disrupt the racial hierarchies that have defined the social, political, and economic relations of the United States historically, the bipartisan consensus that launched the punitive intervention did not believe that African Americans were capable of governing themselves." (337)
This book is about policy, so set your reading expectations accordingly, but truly, it is first-rate history. Highly recommend.
There is a small window when White House policymakers looked at structural racism with Kennedy and the War on Poverty. They linked crime with economic inequality. But it quickly closed as racial bias set policy and things quickly morphed into punitive crime policy, especially after the riots in 1965.
LBJ began the War on Crime and supported legislation to militarize the police and more police surveillance. We move into Nixon who continued those policies and double-down on them. Carter tried to shift a bit more on economic policy on the one hand, but the other, he established more security tactics. Then Reagan and his War on Drugs, which really put the mass incarceration on the fast track. All of this failed, because as a nation, we have not focused on uprooted structural racism and bias that would lead to supporting African-Americans. For example, why set up job training if there are no jobs to go to?
Hinton writes, "Put bluntly, due to its own shared set of assumptions about race and its unwillingness to disrupt the racial hierarchies that have defined the social, political, and economic relations of the United States historically, the bipartisan consensus that launched the punitive intervention did not believe that African Americans were capable of governing themselves." (337)
This book is about policy, so set your reading expectations accordingly, but truly, it is first-rate history. Highly recommend.
dawsonthehughes's review
5.0
I didn’t read every chapter of the book, only the ones assigned for class, but this book was still INCREDIBLY informative
margaretefg's review
4.0
Incredibly detailed, thorough recounting of the rise of mass incarceration from the Kennedy administration through Reagan's War on Drugs. Hinton demonstrates over and over again how policies that emphasized potential criminals effectively criminalized entire low-income African American communities and created criminal records and more crime. The book is exhaustively researched and includes some wonderful anecdotes, especially during the Nixon administration which "fought" crime while actively engaging in all kinds of criminal activity.