Elizabeth Hinton. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America.

Extract

Earlier this decade, Heather Ann Thompson complained that mass incarceration was “largely ignored” (“Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History 97 [December 2010]: 703–734, here 703) by historians of the post–World War II United States. That is no longer true. The past few years have witnessed a surge of scholarship explaining the remarkable growth in the U.S. prison population and its political, economic, and racial effects. A stellar 2015 special issue of the Journal of American History showcased the work of some of the best historians in what has rapidly become one of the discipline’s most exciting subfields. This work has obvious contemporary relevance, as Black Lives Matter and other groups protest mass incarceration, unchecked police violence, and other failings of the criminal justice system. At its best, this new scholarship demonstrates how historians who are morally engaged yet professionally rigorous can bring the past to bear upon the issues of the present.