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Abstract
America's inner cities, while experiencing fewer episodes of major civil violence after the 1960s, had become extremely violent places by the 1980s, riven by street crime, drug trade, gang wars, and a dramatic rise in incarceration rates. While the response to the urban uprisings of the 1960s included a mix of redistributive and retributive programs meant to address the social and economic conditions, discrimination, and segregation that contributed to frustration and despair in the inner city, the overwhelming approach to addressing violence, street crime, and inequality in urban areas during the 1980s was through aggressive policing, punitive policies, and the criminal justice system.
This dissertation seeks to unravel this development. "Managing Marginalization from Watts to Rodney King: The Struggle Over Policing and Social Control in Los Angeles, 1965-1992" explores how the struggles and debates over policing, criminal justice, and law and order politics in Los Angeles after the 1965 Watts uprising shaped the transformation of urban liberalism, shifted understandings of the problems facing late-twentieth century American cities, and influenced inner-city communities of color. By tracking the ground where institutions, local officials, and social movements met and interacted, this dissertation shows how the development of late-twentieth century punitive urban policy was not only a story of government failure or the predetermined triumph of mass incarceration but the outcome of a contested process and the struggle over paramilitary policing, punitive policies, and alternative solutions to urban social problems since the mid-1960s. The contestation surrounding policing and punitive policies spurred by demands from local organizations, social movements, and residents, while unable to alter the asymmetry of coercive state power, was thus part of the making and remaking of the carceral state.
By choosing to address the material consequences of urban decline and racial inequality through crime control policies and intensified policing this dissertation argues that city and law enforcement officials ushered in a new vision of aggressive state authority that reframed problems of poverty as ones of crime and behavior. The lack of responsiveness by local officials to movements and residents demanding an end to police violence and neglect in the late 1960s and early 1970s left an opening for the punitive turn in urban policy and the aggressive, paramilitary police measures associated with the War on Crime, War on Drugs, and War on Gangs that become a central means of maintaining social control over marginalized groups living in segregated areas of concentrated poverty during the late 1970s and 1980s. Such punitive policies reinterpreted who had legitimate claims on the state, produced a disillusionment with government, a sense of fear and suspicion due to possibility of arrest, a rise in incarceration rates, and both a feeling of and literal disenfranchisement among poor inner-city black and Latino residents that led to continued urban decline, rationalized unequal social and economic conditions, and contributed to the eruption of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising.
