Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2016) (There are several lessons implicit in the serious work on the history of criminal justice in the second half of the twentieth century ad the first two decades of the twenty-first. First, when it comes to the war on crime, there is little difference between 'conservatives' and 'liberals, especially when it comes to their willingness to treat crime along racial lines. Two, that many of the same ideals, policies, arguments, academic finding, statistics, etc., that have been trotted out from the 1960s through the 2000s, even though found to be wrong, incomplete, racially biases, etc., are being, and will continue to be, recycled in today. That is, ideas matter, and bad ideas seem to mater a great deal because they have staying power. Three, that the criminal justice system is really an injustice system, and all involved are either active participants in its corruptions, or are complicity and/or naive. And, four, that the war on poverty and the war on crime, both failures and mainly fought along racial lines, may provide insights on how the war on domestic terror will be a failure and lost (or, at least, not won) and fought along racial lines (e.g., Muslims, Arabs and non-Western European immigrants). Woe be us!).
Austin Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, edited and with an introduction by Caleb Smith, foreword by David W. Blight & Robert B. Stepto (New York: Random House, 2016).
