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

Abstract

The great extent of federal involvement in local criminal justice matters was not established overnight, but over the course of several decades. This is the primary subject of Elizabeth Hinton’s book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, wherein she catalogs the vast increases in federal spending on grants to state and local governments for policing and prison initiatives that occurred during the presidential administrations of John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan. Chapter after chapter simply describe the activities of the federal government in influencing local law enforcement and the expansion of prisons over the relevant time period. But the lack of any overarching argument leaves the reader feeling as though he is just reading a long series of facts.