In this interview, Elizabeth Hinton sketches the relationship between the civil rights movement, urban uprisings and the beginning of the “War on Crime,” with a focus on the Harlem Riot of 1964, and the 1965 Watts Rebellion, which was triggered by police brutality and became a key law-and-order talking point. She then moves through a…
Read MoreOur news this week focuses on the prisoners who are fighting California’s wildfires for as little as a dollar an hour while actually fighting fires. In total, about thirty-eight hundred male and female inmates are fighting fires in California. They constitute around thirteen percent of the state’s firefighters. Their low salaries save taxpayers a hundred…
Read MoreThis week we share the first part of a lecture by Elizabeth Hinton delivered at IU on October 12. In her talk, she traces the creation and rise of mass incarceration as a strategy of America’s ruling class. Her historical research, which culminated in a book last year called “From the War on Poverty to…
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