Vera Institute of Justice

Prof. Elizabeth Hinton's From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America examines the implementation of federal law enforcement programs beginning in the mid-1960s that laid the groundwork for the mass incarceration of American citizens. In revealing the links between the rise of mass incarceration in America and earlier anti-poverty programs, Prof. Hinton presents Ronald Reagan's War on Drugs not as a sharp policy departure but rather as the full realization of a shift towards surveillance and confinement that began during the Johnson administration.

Elizabeth Hinton is assistant professor in the Department of History and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Hinton’s research focuses on the persistence of poverty and racial inequality in the 20th century United States. Her current scholarship considers the transformation of domestic social programs and urban policing after the Civil Rights Movement.

Hinton’s articles and op-eds can be found in the pages of the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Time. She also co-edited The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) with the late historian Manning Marable.