A review by margaretefg
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America by Elizabeth Hinton

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.