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

Recommended by Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Dean, Harvard Radcliffe Institute; Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School; Professor of History, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Elizabeth Hinton’s “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime” explains the policy shift soon after passage of landmark Civil Rights legislation during the 1960s from social welfare to criminal justice as a framework for understanding enduring racial inequities, poverty, and unrest. That shift led to the militarization of police departments and the over-policing of urban communities — especially those filled with young black men — and the destructive, and sometimes fatal, consequences that we see today.