A Preemptive Strike: How the U.S. Government Engineered the Carceral State

In late August 1965, following weeks of riots in South Central Los Angeles, officials from the Department of Justice sent a memo to President Lyndon Johnson cautioning against a timid response to the uprising: "There is a wide feeling that the Negro community lacks gratitude for recent economic and civil rights advances, and its demands will grow."

Mass unemployment in the face of a declining industrial sector, extreme poverty and segregation, and a simmering disdain for law enforcement set the backdrop for the Watts riots. The beating and arrest of Rena Price by a group of California highway patrolmen on August 11th was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Over the next six days, 34 people were killed in violent clashes between the LAPD and National Guard and Watts residents.

Journalists and photographers descended on Los Angeles to capture the tumult. Wallace Turner's front page story in the New York Times read: "Negroes in a depressed area of Los Angeles were swept up in an emotional tide of hate and bitterness that caused them to beat and burn."

"This was not a riot," CBS radio told its listeners. "It was an insurrection against all authority. If it had gone much further, it would have become civil war."

The sensationalized depictions of the unrest galvanized the white public and prompted a renewed sense of urgency on Capitol Hill to address the "crime menace."

Elizabeth Hinton, in From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, pinpoints this moment as one of a series of critical junctures in the tug of war between civil rights and crime control in the 1960's, a battle which set the stage for a half-century of punitive federal policy, buoyed by bipartisan support, that produced the modern carceral state.

"Sincere Intentions Yet Highly Flawed"

In her thorough dissection of the policies that fueled the axiomatic rise in black incarceration in the final decades of the 20th century, Hinton traces the origins of the modern carceral state back to the social welfare programs of the early 1960's.

Soon after his inauguration in 1961, John F. Kennedy convened the Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime to examine youth delinquency, which had come to be seen as a national problem. Among the novel social programs developed by the President's Committee included an early childhood education and job training program, which were designed to expose children to the "values, norms, and ways of speaking in dominant society," and make minority groups more employable by helping them develop suitable "work personalities".

In the spring of 1964, Johnson pledged in his first State of the Union Address to continue Kennedy's efforts and to "not only relieve the symptom of poverty but to cure it, and, above all, prevent it." In signing the Economic Opportunity Act, Johnson authorized a $1 billion investment to fight poverty, which included funding for grassroots organizations like Mobilization for Youth, Upward Bound, and Volunteers in Service to America.

While the Economic Opportunity Act remains the most ambitious social welfare program in U.S. history, Hinton contends that both Kennedy's anti-delinquency programs and the community action programs under Johnson's Great Society were fundamentally flawed. The view that cultural and behavior deficiencies — what social scientists called "social pathology" — caused poverty emerged as an intellectual framework through which policymakers launched their national urban intervention. As a result, while these programs provided opportunities for empowerment, their primary objective was to "institutionalize democratic values in urban communities" and "encourage discipline among vulnerable youth".

A Turning Point in the War on Poverty

Although the government's new commitment to racial minorities and the poor was launched in earnest under Kennedy and Johnson, flawed notions about the fundamental causes of black poverty and crime concealed policymakers' own racism, and made them susceptible to pressure to enhance the role of law enforcement as the only means to quell unrest on the nation's streets.

On July 16, 1964, two weeks after the Civil Rights Act outlawed Jim Crow segregation, a demonstration protesting the murder of a fifteen-year-old high school student by a New York City police officer evolved into six nights of looting and burning in Harlem.

President Johnson declared that "the overriding issue in New York is the preservation of law and order". In March 1965, he signed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, marking the first federal investment in local crime control efforts. The LEAA funded new surveillance techniques for police forces serving low-income urban communities, including mobile surveillance and modern weaponry, and called for the police to assume a more central role in public schools.

The Watts riots that summer, followed by protests in Newark and Detroit the following summer, reinforced the importance for many policymakers of crime prevention on the domestic policy agenda. The Safe Streets and Crime Control Act, passed in 1967, provided grants to state and local agencies to increase urban surveillance, and established "Youth Service Bureaus" to channel youth who were seen as "susceptible to delinquency" into crime control agencies.

The explosions in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and other American cities in the mid-1960's exposed the tensions that existed between law enforcement officers and residents in segregated urban neighborhoods, and underscored that, despite civil rights reforms, deep-rooted inequities and racism in American institutions remained.

However, according to Hinton, solutions outside of expanding the role of law enforcement escaped policymakers: "The empowerment of grassroots organizations and residents to change their socioeconomic circumstances proved to be a brief moment in time. Where groundbreaking approaches to community empowerment were met with trepidation, radical new approaches to crime control were encouraged."

By the end of the Johnson administration, police departments had emerged as the primary social service provider in segregated urban neighborhoods which, according to Hinton, did not actually promote public safety, but instead "brought residents into frequent contact with the punitive arm of the state, increasing the likelihood of their eventual incarceration."

While the Office of Economic Opportunity was disbanded after Nixon's inauguration, the budget for the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency grew from $63M in 1969 to $871M in 1974 — a thirteen-fold increase.

All Part of a Master Plan

Among the more striking aspects of Hinton's account is the revelation that policymakers deliberately crafted the conditions that produced the modern carceral state.

Nixon inherited a penal system that had been shedding prisoners. In fact, the 1960's produced the single largest reduction in the prison population in the nation's history. By the end of the 1970's, a record half million Americans were confined in penal institutions.

Far from an inevitable process, Hinton explains that this was by design. At the outset of his presidency, Nixon set out to enact a "Long-Range Master Plan" which called for a three-fold increase in the total budget for prisons. The first of Nixon's crime control bills, the DC Court Reorganization Act, established several new categories of offenders (including "narcotics addicts"), permitted "no-knock" raids, and gave judges the authority to place individuals on probation without a verdict for relatively minor crimes (like public intoxication).

In 1972, the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement placed federal agents in plainclothes on streets in low-income neighborhoods to "search and destroy the property of suspected street-level drug dealers and their clients."

The Career Criminal Program, launched in 1975, introduced sting operations and "stop-and-frisk" policing, and invested $330M in "career criminal prosecutors" who delivered much higher conviction rates. Despite the fact that white citizens accounted for roughly 70 percent of all drug users and 65 percent of drug abuse arrests, by the end of the decade two-thirds of prisoners serving time for drug possession were black.

"What's remarkable about the criminal enterprises the government supported like Operation Sting & the Career Criminal Program is that their lack of success, and the violence and crime they advanced, seemed irrelevant to policymakers in their relentless drive to police urban space and eventually entire populations of young men of color inside prison walls." — Elizabeth Hinton

Under Nixon's watch, violent crime in the country nearly doubled, and property crime rose 24 percent. Although policymakers justified the sustained wave of prison construction by citing the high rates of reported crime during the 1970s, Hinton argues that, in reality, incarceration rates had little relationship to actual crime rates. Rather, the explosion in prison populations "reflected legal changes, crime control investments, and punitive strategies at all levels of government."

By the end of the 1970's, the combination of surveillance, sentencing and incarceration strategies — the seeds of which the Johnson administration had planted and Nixon officials seized upon — set the stage for Ronald Reagan to implement the most draconian elements of the War on Crime. Reagan's Crime Control Act, which increased average prison sentences by 33 percent, and Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which mandated minimum sentences for minor drug offenses, accelerated the explosive growth of the American prison population that continues to this day.

Fixing a Broken System

In the century between the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865 and the passing of the Law Enforcement Assistance Act in 1965, a total of 184,901 Americans entered state and federal prisons. Today, 2.2 million citizens are behind bars — representing a 943 percent increase over the past half century. The United States, which holds 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of its prisoners, is home to the largest prison system on the planet — one that costs taxpayers $80 billion annually.

Racially marginalized Americans bear the brunt of the system: Black Americans and Latinos together constitute 59 percent of the nation's prisoners today, even though they make up roughly a quarter of the entire U.S. population.

The 1960's began with great promise in the fight for racial and economic justice. But while the decade brought an end to the era of Jim Crow, policymakers ultimately succumbed to the prevailing consensus that urban crime was a foregone conclusion, irrespective of the conditions which made such offenses inevitable. In the decades since, a flurry of patchwork legislation to address racial gaps has been dwarfed by an unrelenting campaign to justify excessively punitive measures. Rather than do the necessary work to undo entrenched inequities, policymakers in the post-segregationist era have consistently viewed black life through the lens of white America: As a threat needing to be subdued in order to assuage white angst.

Hinton provides a myriad of policy recommendations for America to reverse course from its current path and finally confront the persistence of inequality within the criminal justice system — from residency requirements for police to civilian review boards to autonomous grassroots social programs to job creation measures.

But if there is one thing to heed from Hinton's remarkable work, it is that the carceral state in its current form did not materialize by chance. Rather, it was the deliberate work of policymakers, law enforcement officials and scholars who, clouded by their own misguided interpretations of urban poverty and crime, made choices that constrained a generation of black Americans. Equipped with this understanding, today's generation of policymakers must make better choices.