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Is Mass Incarceration History? From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: the making OF Mass INCARCERATION IN AMERICA. By Elizabeth Hinton. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016. 464 pages. $29.95.
Introduction: The End of Mass Incarceration
"The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk."1
Despite Hegel's ultimately reassuring premise, it never seemed inevitable that the emergence of mass incarceration as a proper historical subject would occur simultaneously with its institutional and political demise. History, as a scientific and humanistic tradition with its own methodologies, sources, and conventions, inevitably keeps some distance on the present. Typically, a generation or two has passed before a truly significant political development, like the New Deal or the Cold War, escapes the pull of presentist hagiography (or demonology) and comes under the full possession of professional historical gaze, after journalism and political science have had their varying efforts at neutralizing the present. In contrast, the point at which a significant political phenomenon has lost its dominance over the present is a much less regular or inevitable pattern.2 And yet, the recent wave of historical analysis of mass incarceration, a development that began in the 1970s, happens to be emerging at a moment of political questioning more profound than at any time since the late 1960s and early 1970s. From the Supreme Court's powerful condemnation of California's overcrowding3 to the Black Lives Matter movement's growing presence in the streets and voting booths of major cities, the contemporary carceral state is under attack.
While there is no guarantee that we will in fact see substantial institutional change in the size and nature of the carceral state, the emerging historiography of mass incarceration has been shaped by the very possibility of that change and has lessons that could be crucial in strengthening the growing movement for reform. Elizabeth Hinton's impeccably researched study of federal crime policy from the Kennedy through Reagan Administrations is the most telling account yet of this new history of the American carceral state.4 This has been a topic of considerable interest to political scientists and criminologists since the 1990s,5 but Hinton is able to draw on confidential memos and other materials from the National Archives and presidential libraries to draw...