LAUSR

What are the origins of US mass incarceration? As far as politics is concerned, two broad processes are plausible starting points: the demise of postwar liberalism and, from the 1970s onwards, the ascendance of new right conservatism. Many accounts of contemporary US punishment follow this basic outline but focus almost exclusively on the latter half, arguing that mass incarceration was driven by a Republican law and order agenda. The two books under review complicate matters. They tell a longer, more ambiguous story of the relationship between liberalism and conservatism. These texts move us away from the familiar cast of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, with their fiery rhetoric, racial code words and warnings of imminent chaos. Both Elizabeth Hinton’s (2016) From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America and Naomi Murakawa’s (2014) The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America argue that the history of mass incarceration is more bipartisan than is often acknowledged. Elizabeth Hinton’s book analyses the federal government’s response to profound changes in mid-20th-century USA, beginning with postwar economic growth, racial desegregation and the second great migration of African Americans to northern cities. Hinton’s account turns on the 1960s civil rights movement and, crucially, a set of domestic welfare programmes authorized by Democratic Presidents. John F Kennedy and his successor Lyndon B Johnson were both influenced by liberal social science research about the ‘cultural’ sources of poverty and a racialized ‘tangle of pathology’ in urban neighbourhoods. As a result, Kennedy and particularly Johnson embarked on a ‘decisively long-term set of policies’ (2016: 86) to address enduring social problems. Declaring a ‘War on Poverty’ as part of the Great Society, Johnson passed landmark legislation such as the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, described by Hinton as ‘the 724911 TCR0010.1177/1362480617724911Theoretical CriminologyBook reviews book-review2017