Racial Double Standards Under Mass Incarceration: From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime by Elizabeth Hinton

This week we read From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime by Elizabeth Hinton to examine the topic “Racial Double Standards Under Mass Incarceration.” Hinton’s thorough, detailed research illustrates the federal government’s role in the 943% increase in the prison population since the 1960s and its disproportionate impact on African-American and Latino men. 

Hinton argues that even though the War on Poverty is often held up as a shining example of liberalism’s potential benefits, it actually is best understood as a byproduct of the country’s anxieties about race. From the 1960s through the 1980s politicians from both the Republican and Democratic parties shifted away from policies targeting poverty as the cause of crime to instead assume colored communities had flawed “pathologies” making them susceptible to crime, pathologies that could only be broken by instituting a fear of prison or by simply jailing huge percentages of the population (for a copy of my notes, see here). Hinton is able to make these arguments by using sources drawn from the presidential libraries of all of the administrations she studies, observing that leaders from both parties struggled to accept that civil rights laws alone could not guarantee equality since social services, legal institutions, and police forces also maintained unaddressed racial biases.

Hinton begins her study by examining the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s. Kennedy’s administration did seek to improve education, health care, and public benefits programs particularly in the south where they could assist African-American communities. New advances in sociology informed these policy proposals, specifically scholars claiming a criminal “pathology” shaped life in low-income neighborhoods. The net result of these proposals would actually address the problems of inequality by supporting community-based organizations and those supporting African American children, but a key problem remained – they were rooted in the belief that crime’s cause was individual (victims’) psychology and not racial injustice. The Kennedy administration also made little effort to assist successful community organizations already doing community work and instead built new bureaucracies with few immediate ties to local citizens. After Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson expanded many of these programs into his famous War on Poverty agenda, but the program’s optimism was short-lived.   Johnson’s Equal Opportunity Office aimed to support the poor by encouraging the development of locally organized community organizations, but its efforts were opposed by Congressional Republicans who complained these organizations could foster ties to the Democratic Party and served as a rallying cry against the War on Poverty itself.  Perhaps more importantly, Johnson and Democrats responded to protests against police discrimination in Harlem (and elsewhere over the course of the 1960s) by seeking to punish criminal actions rather than acknowledging the causes of the protests; within months of the start of the War on Poverty Johnson had already begun a War on Crime.

Hinton argues the Nixon administration built off of the Johnson’s “law and order” efforts, but rejected the idea that poverty could be a cause of crime at all.  Instead, Nixon believed the threat of incarceration would serve as a deterrent to future crime and encouraged increasing imprisonment of criminals, despite independent studies that concluded incarceration rates had no correlation to crime data (and instead mirrored the socioeconomic inequality of states).  Even though the 1960s had seen the largest decline in the number of inmates in the country’s history, by the end of the 1970s prison populations had risen by 25%. While Nixon had stressed limited federal intervention in state affairs, crime was a notable exception – due to state mismanagement of law enforcement funds and programs, the federal government actually played an INCREASING role in local anti-crime efforts, supported by new laws that elevated local vices such as drug dealing and gambling to federal crimes. Spurred by federal funding, equipment, and new legislation, local police departments embraced increasingly invasive and dangerous tactics that led to accidental home invasions and shooting deaths of civilians, making city streets more violent and leading to additional community protests against police abuses.  Nixon also rejected support for halfway homes and counseling programs, instead supporting only the construction of prisons. By the mid-1970s, policymakers believed incarceration was the only option to address crime and leveled it against an African-American population they understood as inherently criminal as a way to remove this supposedly dangerous group from the streets.

Nixon’s policies in turn served as a building block for anti-crime programs in the 1980s under the Reagan administration. Hinton observes that Reagan’s policies also enjoyed strong support from Congressional Democrats who overwhelmingly voted in favor of many of his proposals. New laws placed disproportionately harsh penalties on drugs such as crack cocaine used by African Americans, but did not address drugs such as methamphetamine used by poor white Americans. Reagan’s policies also cut welfare programs dramatically, framing prison as the only option for dealing with drug addiction. Perhaps most interestingly, Hinton highlights the fact that the era did not see major shifts in the patterns of drug use but rather a shift in the way drug addiction was covered in the media, as it often displayed the problem of “crackheads” in urban communities without addressing the failing schools, unemployment, poverty, and the dangers of over-policing that encouraged drug use. The War on Drugs ultimately sent disproportionately high numbers of African-American and Latino men to prison, building off policies and social thinking that had been in place for two decades and was widely supported by politicians in both parties.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration seems intent on repeating many of these same problematic policies from the past. Trump called for an increasingly active federal presence in law enforcement, despite crime statistics that suggest there is no serious crime problem in the country. As his policies have gone into effect, community organizations have criticized these increasingly aggressive tactics. Famously, NFL players’ high profile protests against police brutality and mass incarceration were met not with sympathy, but calls for them to be “fired.” Hinton’s research suggests that public policy must move beyond approaches that have failed us in the past and instead consider ideas that can address historic inequalities, as the federal government never seriously attempted to increase funding for existing, successful community organizations addressing poverty. Hinton also notes that alternatives to prison construction include better social services such as halfway homes and treatment facilities, policies that were ignored under administrations of the 1970s and 1980s.  She also highlights the role aggressive policing plays in accelerating crime, illustrating how protests against police brutality in the 1960s and 1970s were essentially ignored by the Johnson and Nixon administrations and instead spurred increasingly dangerous police tactics that killed and incarcerated thousands. Hinton’s timely work ultimately reminds us that policies of mass incarceration targeting historically marginalized groups will never solve the problems of crime within our society; instead, we should consider anti-poverty and welfare programs to help build a more just society and eliminate the root causes of crime.