The author, an Assistant Professor at Harvard University and urban historian, argues that mass incarceration is not just a conservative backlash to the civil rights movement but an initiative of both of the major political parties. In the book, Hinton traces mass incarceration, often based on assumptions about the cultural inferiority African-Americans, back to the 1960s, from the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to that of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The Democrats passed the The Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act of 1961 which portrayed black youth as being in need of repair rather than justice. At the same time when President Johnson’s War on Poverty sought to foster equality and economic opportunity, his administration advanced initiatives rooted in widely shared assumptions about African Americans’ role in urban disorder. Johnson called for a War on Crime in 1965 when he created the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance, which significantly increased federal involvement in militarizing local police. From the late 1960s starting with Richard Nixon’s law and order campaign to the 1980s administration of Ronald Reagan, crime control and incarceration dominated national responses to poverty and inequality as initiatives that were the full realization of the punitive transformation of urban policy implemented by both parties.
A search of the BLS Library OneSearch platform will lead readers to a recent review of Hinton’s book in the February 2017 issue of the American Journal of Public Health (Vol. 107 Issue 2) under the title Reckoning with the Rise of the Carceral State by David H. Cloud. For more on the topic, the BLS Library has ordered for its collection a new title, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration—and How to Achieve Real Reform by John F. Pfaff, Professor of Law at Fordham Law School. The book describes a fractured criminal justice system, where many counties do not pay for the people they send to state prisons, and white suburbs set law and order agendas for more-heavily minority cities.
Seeking your next great read? Convo with thought-provoking authors? Fun projects and performances for kids? Grab a “Smashing Pumpkin” from Gregory’s Coffee on Court St. and visit the 2024 Brooklyn Book Festival! A digital guide to this weeklong Festival (Sept. 22 – 30, 2024) will be available through the free Bloomberg Connects arts and culture app.
Everyone can be a part of Virtual Festival Day on Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024 (noon – 5 pm). Whether you seek a new food book (panel: Memory & Flavor: An Expansive Vision of Food & Recipe Writing) or a recent book from an international author (program: Who? New! International), there will be a virtual program to engage you.
Brooklyn Law School will host one of the Festival’s Bookend Events on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024: Protect Your People: Challenging Mass Incarceration Together (RSVP required for this free event.)
This event will highlight the recent book Protect Your People: How Ordinary Families Are Using Participatory Defense to Challenge Mass Incarceration (The New Press, 2024).
The event will feature: Raj Jayadev, the book's author and a MacArthur Fellow, Heather Lewis, Executive Director of the Reuniting Family Bail Fund, and Justine “Taz” Moore, Director of Training at the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. These speakers will converse with Brooklyn Law School Professor & Associate Dean Jocelyn Simonson, author of Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People are Dismantling Mass Incarceration (The New Press, 2023). As noted here, this program will highlight “the innovative storytelling techniques of groups of people who have changed the outcomes of criminal cases by intervening collectively through ‘participatory defense.’” Brooklyn Law School's Center for Criminal Justice is a sponsor of this event.
This Festival’s Children’s Day will be on Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024 from 10 am – 4 pm in Brooklyn Commons (= MetroTech in downtown Brooklyn).
Activities will include:
Goosebumps & Beyond: A Spooky Conversation with R.L. Stine
Mad Libs: Graphic Novel Edition!
Puppet Making Workshop with writer Vojtěch Mašek
A gameshow, Are You Smarter than an Author?, in which participants can test their skills against middle grade novelists.
Festival Day & Literary Marketplace will be on Sunday, Sept. 29, 2024 from 10 am - 6 pm. It features local, national and international authors, publishers and vendors. Many of these programs will occur in Brooklyn Law School and in our “front yard”: Brooklyn Borough Hall. Click here to view the many authors participating in Festival Day.
These are two of many Sept. 29, 2024 Festival Day events that will occur at Brooklyn Law School (w/ links to entries for the authors' books in BLS Library's catalog):
Dreaming of Freedom: How We Move Beyond an Expanding Police State
Brooklyn Book Festival's program description: "With 'robot dogs' at the border, automated surveillance, and arbitrary decisions controlling probation and parole, a system of policing and punishment seems less concerned with fairness or safety than with social control. What does it all have to do with justice?" Program participants will be: sociologist Ruha Benjamin (author of Imagination: A Manifesto), journalist Ben Austen (Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change), and lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar (The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence). The moderator will be Vincent Schiraldi, former Probation Commissioner of New York City and author of Mass Supervision: Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom.
Debt, Solidarity, and Economic Justice presented by Brooklyn Law School
See you at the Festival!
Commenting on blog posts requires an account.
Login is required to interact with this comment. Please and try again.
If you do not have an account, Register Now.