Presenting her new book from the war on poverty to the war on crime the fight the friday forum series takes place during the academic year. Our next and final of the season on policing reform handcuffed. To learn more about this in our many other Upcoming Events visit us online. Todays talk will conclude with some time for your questions after which we will have a book signing right here. We are very pleased to have cspan book tv here taping todays event. You will be recorded and please wait a moment for the microphone to come to you. It is part of how we say thanks. And finally just a quick reminder to silence yourself once. And so now we will introduce todays speaker. Shes the assistant professor in the department of history in the department of african and africanamerican studies at harvard. Research focus is on poverty and racial inequality in the 20h century. She is coeditor of the book the new black history revisiting the second reconstruction they had been published in the journal of American History today she will be discussing her new book the guardian calls it a new history and brooklyn magazine rights a clear eyed and timely book it traces the countries Prison Industrial Complex back to the social wherefore welfare program. This history is heartbreaking it is one that affects an enormous percentage of the country. Read it and vote. Please join me in welcoming elizabeth hinton. [applause]. Thank you for the introduction in for hosting me and including me as a part of the series. Its a privilege to be here. Thank you to all of you for coming out today. I know its incredibly busy time of year but its overwhelming to me to see so many colleagues and friends thank you for coming out. This book is really the first historical account of a National Crime control policy and it traces the rise of mass incarceration in the United States. The garden he the guardian has done in her groundbreaking. I really take that as a compliment. It is the product of a labor of love. In the central files. And when i began this project i have to make the case to other africanamericans and historians of why we need to study crimes. The current political campaign. I think even the fact that you are all here it really shows that we have come over the time to a new moment of where we are in terms of these issues and the consequences of the policy decisions that have been made over the past halfcentury in this country. The book is deeply rooted i thought i would read from the epilogue that was called the war on crime. I hope you will read the book it provides really the first narrative account of the rise of mass incarceration that we have. But if you dont get to read all of the books really read part of the book i hope that at least everyone will walk away with some of the implications that it took me a decade of research to come to. I want to share some of these with you. We can get into conversation about the implications of the book in crime control policies. Or any kind of questions about the book itself. I would welcome questions about the ford and Carter Administration because there has been a lot of focus on my work on the Johnson Administration and rethinking the war on poverty. They are also really kind of important in setting up and laying the groundwork for the crime control and prison infrastructure that Ronald Reagan stepped into when he took office. The punitive transformation of domestic policy in the late 20th century followed a historical pattern. In the shadow of Emancipation National policymakers stopped at the extension of formal equality and instead new criminal laws emerged in the form of codes and convict leasing. The systematic criminalization and incarceration of nearly three people in their descendents shaped local and state lawenforcement practices from the beginning of reconstruction in 1855 into the start of the war on crime in 1965. After this as the military Police Forces it was capable of sustaining a new threshold of prisoners the developments of the earlier timeframe matured into a different approach than social call control. Merging equal opportunity in Crime Control Program which in the great society. It satisfied the policymakers desire to expose the poor of americans to dominant values while suppressing the grips of antisocial and alienated black youth that officials blamed for incidents of collective violence. National priorities increasingly shifted from fighting black poverty to fighting black youth crime. As policymakers introduced near patrol and surveillance measures and targeted urban communities. In the absence of programs that provide concrete means. Poverty and crime increased during the ensuing 15 years at the now National Lawenforcement program. The crime control strategy they proved to have the opposite impacts in the cities and neighborhoods that they placed under siege its one of the most disturbing ironies in history of american domestic policy. By the time Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 africanamericans have been vulnerable on two fronts. A struggle against one another in a struggle with the institutions and policies that they developed. Together the strategies at the core of the National Lawenforcement program said that these are ones that i described in the book. They include preemptive controls. Juvenile liquid seek policies that criminalized generations. While decriminalizing the counterparts. They brought federal lawenforcement to the street. They created an expedited criminal justice. All of these towards internal violence in incarceration. They gave rise to historically distinct network and post of punitive and social welfare opportunities they were serving at the intellectual foundation. It promoted a particular type of social control. One that signals the target arrest. In the late 20th century. The decisions that policymakers and officials as part of a larger coalition of the had and measurable consequences for low income americans and the nations unintended some of those choices may have bent at different times and in different political moments. Ultimately however the bipartisan consultants and eventually removing generations from their communities to live inside the prison. As merely an electoral tactic. By doing so they dont fully realize the promise. For Many Americans it appeared that it ended with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States have to move beyond racebased systems. Alongside the tremendous growth of american Law Enforcement over the last 50 years the assumed positions of power. The displays of black wealth for popular consumption to the residency of barack obama. These achievements promoted discourse and the personal responsibility even further. Making it seem the incarceration of entire groups reflected the natural order of things. Political representation and the fact that some of black americans have substantial wealth. Do not mean that it has ended im sure is not news to many of you who are in the room today. They grew more affluent and by the end of the 20 century the Financial Assets were 7,448. Only 448 about that of the lowest fifth of White American households. Its always been concentrated in the public sphere and social services. In celebrating the inclusion during black History Month every year the fact that many of the reform have been negated by a National Crime control remains unrecognized. Nine years after the passage the Supreme Court ruled constitutional to deny convicted felons the right to vote. They had removed convex ever since the 1974 decision. And today nearly 6 million americans most of them have already served their sentences are deprived of the franchise. As a result. An estimated one out of 13 africanamericans well not vote in the 2016 election due to a prior conviction. A key civil rights game of the 1960s has come undone. You can go on and on to make it already works. It mainly counts people who are incarcerated as residents of the county where they are serving time. The rural areas they are home to the majority of prisons. Urban americans who tended to favor democrats lost representation because of how it works in rural districts gained representation. In order to begin moving towards a more just nation. The grassroots representation. This policy directive proved to be fleeting. Promising initiatives that have been designed in that funding. Directly during the first year were increasingly required to include Public Officials and top level positions following the uprising. Before Community Action programs were given the chance to work. The white house and the justice department, Defensible Space and newLaw Enforcement technologies and low income neighborhoods while fusing police, direction and social welfare programs. Put bluntly, due to its own shared set of assumptions about race and its unwillingness to destruct the racial hierarchies that have defined the social, political and economic groups, did not believe that africanamericans were capable of governing themselves. Nixon expressed the sentiment overtly to his chief of staff, h. R. Haldeman. There has never in history been an adequate black nation, the president said, and they are the only race of which this is true. I know that nixons comments to domestic councilman ehrlichman has been getting press, but the quotes are her kind of telling more kind of telling of the racist intent. Jimmy carter stressed grassroots participation as a critical component of his administrations punitive urban program. Authorities refused to fund citizen groups such as the league to improve the community this chicagos Robert Taylor homes which advocated strategies very much in line with the stated commitments of the administration but sought to implement those strategies without oversight from police and Public Housing authorities. When reagan took office, the rhetoric of Community Involvement vanished from the domestic policy arena, never to return. Its up to you, especially my students, to [inaudible] thats what weve been talking about. Segregated low incomecommunities, on the other hand, their task is to search for suspects and remove offenders and potential offenders from the streets. Disproportionate numbers of africanamericans received criminal records and prison sentences as a result of the differential approaches to Public Safety that policymakers enshrined in crime control legislation. By introducing greater numbers of hostly White Police Officers in the nations most isolated urban areas, only 4 of the sworn Police Officers who fought the war on crime during the second half of the 1960s and through the 1970s were of africanamerican descent, a low figure. James baldwin observed the impact of this dynamic as early as 1961 as my students know. The only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive, baldwin wrote, in nobody knows my name. Police officers represented, in baldwins words, the force of the white world and that worlds criminal profit and ease to keep the black man corralled up this here in its place like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country. Baldwin went on to observe that the Police Officer faced, quote, daily and nightly the people who would gladly see him dead, and he knows it. With suspicion on both sides, the problem as baldwin identified it lay not in the individual policeman, but in the systemic forces that supported questionable and sometimes deadly policing practices. The response of outside forces on the segregated urban beat and the response of residents to the presence of those forces were the outcomes of both historical developments and socioeconomic circumstancement yet the officer had few alternatives but to act in the manner in which he or she had been conditioned and trained. More than a half century after baldwins insight, aggressive policing rackses and mass incarceration have become the foremost civil rights issue of our time. Low this many citizens hub empowered to income citizens must be fully integrated into all institutions. Residents and communities should be responsible for keeping their own communities safe. Various National Reforms such as Police Body Cams merely continue the use of taxpayer dollars to Fund New Equipment for Police Forces, a process that began with the Law Enforcement assistance act of 1965. The militarization of American Police and overpolicing of black neighborhoods is a policy path that has consistently provenhighly unsuccessful as a Crime Reduction strategy and fuels mass incarceration and Racial Disparities within the nation. Now is the time to try new strategies there residency requirements for police to civilian review boards to autonomous grassroots social programs to job creation measures for atrisk groups who policymakers originally labeled outside of a service economy. That will enable us to confront be, finally, the entrenched systemic inequalities and Civil Liberties violences that exist as well as the persistence of inequality in the United States. In august 2014 during a series of demonstrations in ferguson, missouri, images of Law Enforcement authorities drawing m4 carbine rifles and dropping tear gas on protesters and civilians alike shocked much of the american public. Ferguson looked like a war zone, prompting new discussions about the nations punitive domestic policy priorities. Outrage over the deaths of unarmed africanamerican citizens and the general lack of Police Accountability for those killed in the year after the death of Michael Brown and the tergson outbreak, so during 2014, and im going to say their names in tribute to them, this includes ed sell ford, dante parker, tamir rice, laquan mcdonald, natasha mckenna, tony robinson, anthony be hill, megan [inaudible] maya hall, walter scott, freddie gray, alexa christian, sandra bland, sam duboise and christian taylor. Their deaths have set a new climate for social movements and federal action. The conditions of the Police Encounters that ended in the loss of eachover their lives and the lives of thousands of other innocent citizens that will never be known could have been entirely avoided had federal policymakers decided to respond in a different way to the Civil Rights Movement and the enlightened protests of the 1960s. Questions of intent or the degree to which federal policymakers foresaw the consequences of the choices they made with respect to urban social programs and black communities are only relevant to a certain extent. The issue is to uncover the series of decisions that made contemporary mass incarceration possible in order to discover our own actual history. The domestic policies of the center of this book shape the lives of black women and men, their families and their communities. And these policies will shape life prospects for black children and their childrens children even if the criminal Justice System is transtomorrowed once again. Transtomorrowed once again. A step in the right direction, the United States would still be home to the largest penal system in the world be if we only released those placed behind bars for drug offenses. And as long as Law Enforcement remains at the tore front of domestic forefront of domestic urban policy and remains focused on young urban citizens of color, their aggressive impulses of the last half century will continue to erode american democracy. Barring fundamental redistributive changes at the national level, the cycle not of poverty, but of racial marginalization, socioeconomic isolation and imprisonment is ever more likely to repeat itself. Thank you. [applause] questions, comments. [inaudible] [inaudible conversations] ohioan . Microphone . Ive been reading your book, and you often seem to suggest that the remedies for racism involve structural change. Maybe you could elaborate on what you mean by that. I think in terms of if we want to think about the kind of root causes of what we call crime and violence, it really stems from mass unemployment and the fact that the United States economy transitions during the period where johnsons calling the war on crime from a vibrant industrial Manufacturing Sector to outsourcing much of the labor. So in the communities where Police Officers or the federal government begins investing in augmenting police force and simulating a new level of police patrols, these communities are placed under surveillance when really, you know, this Job Creation Program for as i mentioned in the epilogue hostly White Police Officers is created. Structural solutions in terms of job creation, in terms of rethinking education systems, in terms of investing in education and going beyond remedial pro