History doesn’t always speak so directly to the present, but Heather Ann Thompson’s Pulitzer-winning book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising and Its Legacy might as well be in direct conversation with today’s issues of mass incarceration, police brutality, and racial conflict. As if to prove this, the New York Times was a finalist for the Pulitzer in the same year as Thompson (2017) for their investigative reporting on racial discrimination in disciplinary measures in New York State prisons. Then, as now, urban blacks were guarded by rural whites and faced a striking racial disparity in parole decisions and disciplinary […]
Excerpt: “Making Mass Incarceration”
The following is an excerpt from Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime. Elizabeth is Assistant Professor in the Department History and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Hinton’s research focuses on the persistence of poverty and racial inequality in the 20th century United States. If you’d like to explore the broader historical context of mass incarceration, you may watch After Attica: Criminal Justice and Mass Incarceration on our YouTube channel. In the century between the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865 and Johnson’s call for the War […]
