University of Chicago

Graduate Student, History

Ph.D. Candidate

Thesis Title: The Making of the "Carceral State": Race, Punitive Politics, and the Changing Logic of Incarceration, New York 1956-1986.

About

EDUCATION
Ph.D. Candidate, University of Chicago, Department of History.
Advanced to candidacy June, 2008. Defending dissertation May, 2012
Major Field of Study: United States 20th Century
M.A. University of Chicago, Department of History, 2007
B.A. Bard College, History and Multiethnic Studies, with honors, 2002

DISSERTATION:
University of Chicago, Expected Completion: May, 2012
Title: The Making of the Carceral State: Race, Punitive Politics, and the Changing Logic of Incarceration. New York 1951-1986.
Committee Chair: Thomas C. Holt 

PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS
American Historical Association
Coordinating Council for Women in History
The Organization of American Historians
Alcohol and Drugs History Society
American Studies Association

PUBLICATIONS
Under review for publication: “The Passage of the Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Rise of Punitive Drug Policy” in the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Solicited submission.
The article comes from a chapter in my dissertation that investigates early debates surrounding the Rockefeller Drug Laws. In the article, I examine public discourse in Harlem where black New Yorkers grappled with the problem of police neglect in the face of rising crime and heroin addiction on the one hand, and police violence and discriminatory targeting on the other hand. While the community debated the trade-off of civil liberties for promises of police protection, Governor Nelson Rockefeller used the support of a few black community leaders to promote his draconian sentencing scheme to white liberals and moderates.
The dissertation chapter from which this article is taken goes on to evaluate the ethos of mandatory minimum sentencing and the popularization of increasingly punitive crime policy after the Rockefeller Laws were passed.


UPCOMING TALKS, PRESENTATIONS AND PAPERS:
Organization of American Historians.
Session #: 2181 Date: Thursday, April 19, 2012 | Time: 1:30 PM
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Rise of Punitive Policy at the Federal, State, and Local Levels
Abstract: Mass imprisonment is one of the most striking social, economic, and political developments within the United States over the last decades. Historians, however, have only begun to examine the process through which the American carceral state came to fruition. Sociologists and political scientists have long been concerned with criminal matters, but their explanations often attribute the increased reliance on crime control and anti-drug policy as an electoral tool. This panel proposes to broach the issue of how the War on Poverty gave way to the War on Crime and a new dominance of punitive rationales for state intervention. Each presenter touches upon how policy transitions at the local, state, and federal level helped secure the nation's punitive turn beginning in the mid to late 1960s, in the immediate context of the War on Poverty.

Jessica Neptune and Elizabeth Kai Hinton investigate the limitations of the liberal vision and ask how liberal anti-crime initiatives failed, were defeated by punitive policy, or were themselves instrumental in the origins of the carceral state. Neptune examines the ideological underpinnings of liberal criminal and penal theory in the era of the Great Society. Far from being dominated by the punitive policies known collectively as "law and order," dominate criminology from 1964-1968 argued that the keys to combating crime included less use of the prison, and an increase in social services and alternatives to incarceration. Hinton considers how the Nixon Administration set Lyndon Johnson's national law enforcement program into motion and operated new federal crime-fighting institutions in major cities. She provides critical perspective on the transition in the federal government's punitive approach, from an emphasis on combating the root causes of crime to an emphasis on managing the effects of institutionalized inequality. In examining urban law enforcement programs designed by liberals and directed by the Department of Justice under Nixon, Hinton's paper speaks to the ways in which the race-neutral terms of crime control policy supported inherently racist surveillance practices. Finally, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann illuminates how these punitive trends developed at the state level. Her paper examines California's passage of the first major determinate sentencing law, which proclaimed punishment as incarceration's primary purpose and formally abandoned parole boards and the penal system's rehabilitative mission. Embracing fixed sentencing accommodated prisoners' critiques of the "therapeutic prison," but was ultimately instrumental in positioning law enforcement professionals and their increasingly militaristic punishing strategies as the inevitable, obvious guarantors of public safety.

By demonstrating the prominence of crime control in United States political economy and identifying the larger material and ideological shifts that comprised the punitive turn of the late twentieth century, the presenters all speak to critical, yet largely unrecognized, political developments in recent history. Ultimately, this session illuminates how the reorientation of domestic policy and the ways in which federal and state programs spawned by the War on Poverty and the War on Crime unleashed and rationalized the prison explosion of the late twentieth century.

Participants
Chair: Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Commentator: Heather Ann Thompson, Temple University

Arming the Footsoldiers: The Nixon Administration and Federal Investment in Urban Police Forces
Elizabeth Kai Hinton, Columbia University, Center for Contemporary Black

Warring on Poverty *is* Warring on Crime: The Problem of Crime in the Great Society, 1964-1968
Jessica Neptune, University of Chicago

Embracing Punishment: The Demise of the Rehabilitative Ideal and the Rise of Punitive Criminal Sentencing in California, 1968-1980
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Cornell University