Why Mass Incarceration Matters

In her award-winning article, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” author Heather Ann Thompson writes that “historians have largely ignored the mass incarceration of the late twentieth century and have not yet begun to sort out its impact on the social, economic, and political evolution of the postwar period.” Historian Elizabeth Hinton’s book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, is one response to Thompson’s article in that Hinton traces the birth of the War on Poverty as a culmination of government policies. As her central thesis, Hinton posits that “the expansion of the carceral state should be understood as the federal government’s response to the demographic …show more content…
Johnson, but with the presidency of John F. Kennedy, whose creation of the “President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime in the spring of 1961 began a series of direct government interventions in cities with high concentrations of black citizens.” Much of the source material relies heavily on sources that were contemporary to the time period, which include presidential addresses to Congress as well as personal accounts. Additionally, Hinton fully utilizes FBI statistics on the incarceration rate as well as reports from other executive committees, such as the LEAA, or Law Enforcement Assistance …show more content…
Much of what Hinton addresses and talks about in her book is distancing herself from the idea that the incarceration of African-Americans and Latinos was advocated by a single political party. Hinton outright dismisses this, claiming instead that “[a]cross party lines and working together during and between political campaigns, representatives increased urban patrol forces, enacted harsh and racially biased sentencing laws, and endorsed new penal institutions that made mass incarceration possible.” This was a strength of the book because the author needed to show how advocacy for incarceration transcended the presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson. In contrast to this, Hinton’s examination is a “top-down” procedure, where presidents and members of the government are portrayed as the major culprits in extending and reinvigorating the growth of the carceral state. A point of criticism can be taken with how the author fails to fully explore the more in-depth effects of incarceration on the local level of cities such as Detroit and Chicago. Taking a look at the effects from the “ground-up” might introduce new voices into the narrative and showcase the response some individuals took in reacting to the actions of the