Literature Review

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander primarily points to the War on Drugs, a reaction to the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, as the root cause of Mass Incarceration. She argues that discriminatory policies from the War on Drugs greatly disadvantaged African American citizens in the modern era, to a point where it has become as oppressive as the Jim Crow era. James Forman Jr. refutes the idea that Mass Incarceration policies stemmed as a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement, pointing to the earlier War on Crime as the start of discriminatory policies. Elizabeth Hinton does the same and looks back even further, pointing to discriminatory and misguided policies in the War on Poverty. What Hinton overlooks is the role of partisan politics in the development of economic policy. My essay will investigate the role of compromise and politics in the economic policy of the JFK administration’s War on Poverty, with a specific focus on “new economics” and connect this back to the War on Crime and its damaging policies. I will use the work of Alice O’Conner, who investigates the role of science in social policy of the 20th century. She displays the effects of politics in the policy of JFK throughout the War on Poverty. 

Sources:

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Tenth Anniversary edition., The New Press, 2020.

Forman, James Jr. “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow.” New York University Law Review, vol. 87, no. 1, 2012, pp. 21–69.

Hinton, Elizabeth Kai. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Harvard University Press, 2016. davidson.primo.exlibrisgroup.com, https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674969223.

O’Connor, Alice. “In the Midst of Plenty: The Political Economy of Poverty in the Affluent Society.” Poverty Knowledge, Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 139–65. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7s5p3.10.

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