Author’s Response

I am deeply humbled by Simon Balto’s, Martha Biondi’s, Kevin Boyle’s, and Touré F. Reed’s thoughtful consideration of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. It is truly an honor to engage my work with four scholars who have influenced my own thinking and whom I deeply admire. And I am grateful to the Newberry Library and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History for bringing us into conversation.The book mainly draws from Department of Justice records and the White House central files of the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations to offer the first historical account of federal crime-control policy. Admittedly, this source base led me to view the federal government as the central driver of the rise of the carceral state during the 1960s and 1970s. As Balto points out, local police forces can and did act in punitive ways on their own accord. “The story is that the crime war—and the even more punitive policies that followed—gave police forces more tools to do the things that they were already, for all intents and purposes, doing or trying to do,” in his words.Indeed, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other major cities prosecuted respective crime wars of their own during the postwar period. But the launch of the federal War on Crime in 1965 allowed smaller cities—from Stockton, California; to Alexandria, Virginia; to Gary, Indiana; to Rochester, New York—to also join the fight against “lawlessness” and “disorder” in black urban neighborhoods with M-1 carbine rifles, bulletproof vests, criminal-justice databanks, and tactical street units. (President Bill Clinton’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which implemented on a national scale the “zero tolerance” policing that law- enforcement authorities in New York and Chicago developed in the late 1980s, is a more recent example of this same local-federal dynamic.) The book demonstrates that the federal War on Crime contributed to the ongoing militarization and professionalization of big-city forces while simultaneously building the weapons arsenal of urban police departments across the United States.Balto also questions my decision to begin the story at the height of progressive social change and the civil rights revolution, suggesting that the rise of national law enforcement can be traced to the New Deal era. However, beginning with President John F. Kennedy’s antidelinquency demonstration programs and Lyndon B. Johnson’s widespread implementation of these measures as a “War on Poverty,” federal policymakers designed and supported an unprecedented intervention that very clearly targeted black urban citizens for the first time in American history. Amid growing demands for socioeconomic inclusion and a rising generation of low-income black urban youth, who national officials and social scientists frequently described as “social dynamite” during the first half of the decade, policymakers could no longer ignore the problem of inequality and historical racism. Since black citizens had been structurally excluded from the GI Bill, Social Security, welfare, and other benefits FDR established, the New Frontier and the Great Society marked an attempt on Kennedy’s and Johnson’s part to realize the promises of Reconstruction and to extend the programs of the New Deal to black citizens. Urban social programs took a historically distinct turn in the 1960s as a result of these new commitments, one that fostered the punitive transformation of domestic policy and that eventually precipitated the mass incarceration of racially marginalized citizens.In addition to a new focus on the plight of black Americans among national officials, the 1960s and 1970s also witnessed the inclusion of social scientists in policy circles in new ways. Reed’s response provides important analysis on the critical role social science research played in shaping domestic programs during this period. According to Reed, the War on Poverty didn’t go far enough because policymakers’ “emphasis on social pathology . . . functioned, from the start, as an alternative to redressing structural sources of inequality.” Reed’s nuanced analysis of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: A Case for National Action underscores this assessment. Moynihan’s attention to institutional rather than economic forces led the Johnson administration to embrace community action as an alternative to real structural change. Had social scientists analyzed black poverty in socioeconomic terms, we might have achieved an entirely different set of outcomes. Instead policymakers consistently championed pathological interpretations and chose to preserve the status quo, either out of their own racism or out of an unwillingness to undermine their own class position.Reed concludes that the War on Poverty “was doomed to fail”; Boyle argues for a more sympathetic treatment and takes issue with my claims about the extent to which the rise of the carceral state can be traced to the Great Society. Without question, the Johnson administration made significant strides in improving education, health care, housing, and access to public assistance. Yet the programs of the 1965 Education Act did not represent a massive infusion of resources or an overhaul of some of the most underserved public schools. Instead the Johnson administration supported remedial education programs (again inspired by pathological assumptions) and created new opportunities for low-income citizens to attend college. Moreover, while poor black citizens received training for jobs, the Johnson administration stimulated a job-creation program for (mostly white) police officers charged with patrolling black and Latino neighborhoods. Policymakers essentially disbanded the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) after less than ten years, while the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance evolved into the larger, more permanent Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA).Boyle interprets Johnson’s decision to hold off on signing the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 until the last possible day before it would be a pocket veto as a reflection of his ambivalence about the War on Crime and the introduction of block grants into domestic urban policy. Although Johnson was bothered by block grants, he tacitly endorsed them for the national law-enforcement program, ending the federal-local partnerships that had steered the administration of the OEO and many other War on Poverty programs.In many ways block grants represented a virtual preservation of states’ rights after Jim Crow, but this gave the Johnson administration less pause than the possible consequences of the wiretapping provisions Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee had added to the Safe Streets Act. Conservatives disliked federal authority at the local level, but Title III of the legislation increased federal control over criminal-justice sanctions, and particularly over matters related to street crime, by authorizing state and local police to engage in the electronic surveillance of suspects for two days without a court order, with the possibility of thirty-day extensions, for nearly any serious crime. As a first step in turning back the decisions of the Warren court during the 1960s, such as Miranda v. Arizona and Mapp v. Ohio that expanded defendants’ rights and protected the right to privacy enshrined in the Fourth Amendment, Title III posed a formidable challenge to the judiciary’s authority in setting legal procedure, creating a new role for congressional policymakers in setting the criminal code.The wiretapping provision made the decision to sign the Safe Streets Act “difficult and troublesome” for the president. In mid-June, after the legislation had passed both chambers of Congress, Attorney General Ramsey Clark wrote to Johnson. Clark called the final version a “bad bill” that “barely resembles the Safe Streets Act we sent the Congress with such high hopes and ardent pleas.” Clark viewed the legislation as “more a reflection of the fears, frustration and politics of the times than an intelligent carefully tailored measure designed to meet the urgent need to professionalize police, coordinate criminal justice and effectively protect the public.” Although Clark recognized that a pocket veto might inflame conservatives and ultimately lead to a “worse bill,” he encouraged Johnson to reject the legislation due to its possible repressive consequences with respect to the privacy of ordinary Americans, an action that would “increase confidence among youth, minorities, and others in our government, our laws, and national purpose.” Clark had warned Johnson that “this first federal authorization could set a trend that would destroy privacy and liberty in the difficult years ahead,” compromising the long list of the administration’s legislative accomplishments.1 Clark took no issue with the block-grant provision and its implications for the future of the administration’s preferred grant structure. In the end, Johnson felt it was more important to pass a crime-control act than to risk having it die and holding out to ensure that national crime-control policies would uphold more progressive interpretations of constitutional protections. This internal debate only reinforces my point about the shortcomings of liberal social policy. More radical solutions were consistently shied away from due to the Democratic Party’s racist blind spots.Biondi and Balto’s responses suggest that From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime can function as a road map for generations of scholars and graduate students to consider the development of the carceral state at all levels of government. Ideally, future studies will, as Balto urges, “examine a police force and try to trace in specific and dedicated fashion how the War on Crime changed what they were able to do as the crime war escalated.” I have tried to examine the development of law- enforcement and criminal-justice policies nationally—and the assumptions about race and crime that undergirded them at every turn—to provide the necessary context to execute such an on-the-ground study. Of course, various local perspectives may challenge many of my own core arguments and conclusions. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime will stand the test of time.In addition to opening up new historiographical questions, I researched and wrote the book between the Katrina and Ferguson crises with an eye toward new policy paths. Biondi touches upon one of the main takeaways of my research—namely, that “in poor black and brown communities police and prisons advance not the public safety of residents but their criminalization.” In presenting a “compendium of evidence for the prosecution of the United States in an international human-rights tribunal,” as Biondi describes the tone of the book, I demonstrate that the crime-control policies of the last half century have not made us safer or improved American society in fundamental ways. Given this, Biondi ultimately challenges us to consider what criminal-justice transformations and forms of abolition might look like.Today, under President Donald Trump, who pledges to restore “law and order” and return to this same failed set of domestic priorities, the point about domestic- policy failures cannot be stressed enough. Our democracy will erode even further as long as our social programs continue to respond to problems of unemployment, educational disparities, and inhumane living conditions with more police, more surveillance, economic extraction, and incarceration. As we think about alternatives, fighting to realize the paths not chosen are as much if not more important than the paths chosen

Conversation · Crime control · Criminal justice · Criminology · Government (linguistics · Honor · Mass incarceration · Political science · Prison · Punitive damages · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · White (mutation · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Law · Policing Practices and Perceptions · Race, History, and American Society

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• The Long and Devastating Reach of Federal Crime-Control Policies

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