From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime
By Elizabeth Hinton, Harvard University Press, 464 pages, $30
What if the mass incarceration and policing of African Americans in the United States was conceived not by reactionary Republicans, but progressive Democrats? What if, in order to understand why police kill people daily and why there are about a million black faces behind bars in the US, you need to look beyond the usual bogeymen of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, but at the liberal lions John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson?
These are questions evoked by Elizabeth’s Hinton’s magisterial new history “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: the Making of Mass Incarceration in America”. It reads as a kind of prequel to Michelle Alexander’s 2010 bestseller “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”. Hinton argues that our carceral state was built over decades “by a consensus of liberals and conservatives who privileged punitive responses to urban problems as a reaction to the civil rights movement”.
“Harper’s” magazine recently published an infamous interview with disgraced Nixon aide John Ehrlichman in which he said drug prohibition came about because the Nixon White House “had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people”. As they couldn’t outlaw either, they got “the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin” and criminalised both to destroy them.
While Hinton deals with Nixon and his “long-range masterplan” for prison in the latter half of her book, she also explains that “even if all the citizens serving time for drug convictions were released, the United States would still be home to the largest penal system in the world”. She delivers a more wide-ranging indictment of liberalism instead.
Hinton sketches how free black people have been systematically shut out of American opportunity since slavery. By the 1890 census, blacks formed 12 per cent of American society and 30 per cent of its prisoners — and that overrepresentation only increased by the mid-20th century. Meanwhile, by the 1960s, “unemployment rates of African Americans were more than double their white counterparts” — similar to how black people are twice as likely to be unemployed as their white counterparts today.
Liberalism failed to target the economic inequality wrought by decades of systemic racism. Instead, it blamed the personal moral failings of contemporary young people. With its “total attack” on youth delinquency, the Kennedy administration began pinning the scourges of poverty and racism on troubled kids. Kennedy’s social policies pathologised teenagers in the “inner city” and called for the creation of punitive juvenile detention centres — but none of that made any of those increasingly policed kids, or the communities they lived in, any physically or economically safer.
It was really his successor, Lyndon Johnson, whose Great Society cleared the path for mass incarceration. In March 1965, Johnson sent “three bills to Congress that epitomised the federal government’s ambivalent response to the civil rights movement”: the Housing and Urban Development Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Law Enforcement Assistance Act.
The first two, ostensibly, were meant to help poor black people, by increasing access to housing and to the vote. But the third — not talked about so much now as the other two — put the federal government into the local law enforcement business just as black political power was rising. Federalisation opened the door for private business to sell local governments military gear, on Uncle Sam’s dime, in order to keep that power in check. Johnson’s efforts, Hinton argues, were thus a “manifestation of fear about urban disorder and about the behaviour of young people, particularly African Americans”.
Johnson quickly followed the War on Poverty with the War on Crime, which he called “a war within our own boundaries” that “costs taxpayers far more than the Vietnam conflict”. The wars’ casualties quickly and disproportionately became black people.
Hinton also charts the rise of programmes such as Police Athletic Leagues and gives urgently needed context on the current debate about community policing. There’s a great photo in the middle of the book of young black men playing cards in a teen centre with cops in DC in 1968. These efforts to improve community relationships with the police had a sinister side: they were preemptive strikes for cops to find “potential criminals” under the cover of providing social services. Eventually, “policing became the main form of social service — when drugs came, folks had no one to call but the police”.
Hinton doesn’t only blame the police, though. She tracks how money is spent on building prison-like security features to public housing in St Louis (which terrified residents), charts money spent on job training programmes and demonstrates how the LEAA grows 13-fold. And yet, “a federal employment drive to create jobs for black men never materialised” in the manner of the Works Progress Administration, which rescued impoverished white people during the great depression. At the same time, in allocating generous funding through the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance, the Johnson administration did underwrite robust hiring in nearly all-white police departments — some of which also began patrolling inner-city school campuses.
Johnson once said, “No right is more elemental to our society than the right to personal security and no right needs more urgent protection.” This was the “all lives matter” argument of its day: a dog whistle to scaremonger white voters into believing black civil rights were a threat to their safety (and a playbook which Oval Office aspirants, not to mention the NRA, have evoked ever since).
Hinton’s view is very much in line with several powerful recent studies which show how conservatism and liberalism alike have created white supremacy in America. Alexander’s work is only the beginning. For a more complete picture of the American left’s complicity in it all, you can now turn to Naomi Murakawa’s “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America”, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s “Golden Gulag: Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California”, Laleh Khalili’s “Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies”, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation” and Angela Y. Davis’s “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement”.
Read these women together, and you’ll get a pretty complete education about the cycle between colonisation, the plantation, foreign conquest, domestic militarism and the prison in the United States.
White men have often been posited as the authorities of the history of a nation rife with the enslavement, disenfranchisement, internment and incarceration of non-white people. So it is great to see women security scholars of colour being read inside and outside of the academy on these subjects. These academics know not to leave any Americans in power, even on the left, off the hook. The ideology of white supremacy spans across the US political spectrum, as Bill Clinton himself recently made clear.
In the middle of the last century, liberalism’s answer to what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called “the problem of the colour-line” was not to redress African American injustice. Titans of liberalism tried to contain black agency and rage so that they didn’t upset whiteness. Some of the goals of the Great Society might have been lofty, but its execution by Johnson and his successors gave us expanded surveillance and our present carceral nightmare instead.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
