The Problem of Mass Incarceration

Johnson’s Wars on Poverty—and Crime

During the second half of the 20^th Century, offenders of all ages were victim to the first aggressive attacks on crime, and especially on poorer black neighborhoods, and the beginnings of our modern problems with adult and juvenile justice begin. President Johnson, in an era of modern-day liberal thought, wanted his tenure to be defined by his Great Society policies, yet it was Johnson who set in place our “war on crime” mindset. He advanced a progressive agenda to tackle the War on Poverty that, in theory, might have quashed some of the urban problems like joblessness and inadequate housing that caused much of that decade’s crime.  He gave us Head Start and Job Corps programs and Youth Opportunity Centers along with the Housing and Urban Development Act and the Voting Rights Act.  In 1965 President Johnson’s Great Society brought federal funds to improve the states of youth crime and prevention. But over Johnson’s five summers in office, the country experienced “more than 250 incidents of urban civil disorder,” involving more than 100,000 black citizens and police and causing and billions of dollars of destruction. Americans were alarmed at the consistent violence, associated it with other violent urban crime in general, and wanted a response.  Elizabeth Hinton explains how the merging of his antipoverty and anticrime initiatives in black communities merged to lay the groundwork for our modern mass incarceration system, over-populated by black Americans.¹¹  

“During the first half of the 1960s, antipoverty programs expanded the degree of federal influence in the everyday lives of black urban Americans. By fashioning a new liberal synthesis that brought crime-control strategies under the fold of social welfare programs, federal policy makers eased the shift toward national punitive programs in the second half of the decade.”

Johnson wanted 1965—the year he funded youth crime prevention—to be the year remembered “as the year when this country began a thorough, intelligent, and effective war against crime.” While Johnson understood poverty to be the root cause of crime, his administration sought to head off crime more immediately—to appease growing anxiety about the rise of urban black crime—with the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965, which won with a unanimous vote in Congress.  Crime couldn’t just be eradicated; in the meantime, it had to be controlled. Through the first half of the 1960s, federal influence increased in the daily lives of black urban Americans through antipoverty programs and expanded in a “new liberal synthesis that bought crime-control programs under the fold of social welfare programs,” easing the shift from one to the other in the second half of the decade. Still under the umbrella of his Great Society, Johnson gave us the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets act in 1968.  It expanded the prison state by financially incentivizing and often requiring state and local authorities to increase surveillance and patrols in black urban neighborhoods. Eventually, antipoverty program support leveled, but over time, support for crime management and control increased. US Attorney General Nick Katzenbach worked to supply urban police with equipment as riot prevention measures, getting bulletproof vests, machine guns, and armored vehicles into these neighborhoods.¹² All of these actions and policies reinforced notions of our black urban population as a criminal one.

Oklahoma, benefitting from Johnson’s Great Society funding, moved to bring facilities and some practices up to then-modern standards. Work began to bring the 200 buildings in use to code and to humane standards. Social workers, psychologists, nurses, speech and hearing clinicians, special education teachers and recreational aides were either hired or reassigned from other department programs. We were finally making progress. In 1968 Oklahoma was one of the first states to receive a grant through Johnson’s Juvenile Delinquency Prevention and Control Act. For a decade outside sources had been recommending a statewide probation system to serve the juvenile courts, in addition to detention and aftercare.  These systems along with training programs were finally created that year. Maybe the most important outcome of the Children's Code was mandatory due process for each youth. While the war on crime was just beginning for adults, juveniles were benefitting from progressive policy in Oklahoma—at least for the time being.