Elizabeth Hinton The Evolution Of Mass Incarceration Summary

Elizabeth Hinton’s work is a major contribution to the increasing scholarship on the “punitive turn” that has emerged over the last seven years. In her extensively researched book, Hinton addresses some of the common misperceptions about the political and ideological foundations of mass incarceration. As she delineates the to date largely overlooked relationship between social welfare and crime control policies and its instrumental role in the creation of the carceral state, Hinton shows how race continued to shape federal policies well beyond the 1960s. Building upon, but also challenging some of the notions that scholars like Michelle Alexander have popularized over the last few years, Hinton illustrates the concerted bipartisan consensus …show more content…
Moreover, she illustrates that little of the liberal outgrowth in spending, which many scholars have identified as the major reason for the electoral backlash in the late 1960s, actually reached impoverished African American communities, least that the inhabitants actually profited from the social welfare programs that were implemented through the early domestic allocation of block grants. In addition to delineating the continuances between the Democratic and Republican administrations, Hinton demonstrates how racial paternalism continued to inform both the structure and the implementation of the Great Society’s social welfare programs. As such, the federal policies of the Great Society sustained a policy of massive disinvestment in African American communities, creating jobs that were mostly given to Whites instead of supporting successful initiatives that were already in …show more content…
Moreover, just as Brown’s account describes the disinvestment in African American and Latino workers and the extreme poverty and hazards they were exposed to, Hinton illustrates how short-lived and restricted the belated inclusion of poor, non-white members into the ranks of the Growth Liberalism beneficiaries was. While Zelizer is correct in directing our attention to the generally high opposition to tax increases in the U.S., he fails to account for the racial undertones many of these debates had, especially since the late 1960s. As other “race-centered” historians before her, Hinton shows that opposition to lasting racial reforms was not restricted to Southern conservatives, as Zelizer suggests. Rather, Hinton illustrates that the consensus that fostered the turn from rehabilitative to punitive measures that led to the criminalization of entire neighborhoods had a broad national basis. As such, the matter at hand might not necessarily be a lack of a celebratory historical scholarship on state-building under major financial constraints, but rather a matter of correcting the public misinformation on how the money has been spent and promoting