Whiteness as property: re-assessing the convergence of race and property in U.S. history

Homesteading and Property Rights; Or, "How the West Was Really Won"

PRICE or rent control is but one of many forms of legislative action which interfere with private contracting in the market place. To delimit the scope of my analysis, I shall use the term "price control" to refer only to any set of regulations which satisfies the following three conditions. First, the control must fix the price (or income)' terms of private contracts; this categorically excludes any laws which regulate the distribution of income among the contracting parties on a share or percentage basis.2 Second, the control must involve no appropriation of proceeds to or from the government; taxation and subsidization are thus excluded. Finally, the fixing of price must not be associated with direct government sales, purchases, or manipulation of resources so as to maintain the regulated price;3 by this stipulation, price "support" is also excluded. Even on such terms, legal regulations to control price are still many and varied. To evaluate our understanding of the class of phenomena which we seek to explain it is essential that we discover implications refutable by facts. By this criterion the available body of economic theory pertaining to price control is deficient indeed: the massive literature on the subject offers few such implications.4 An alternative approach to analyzing the observable effects of price control is presented here.

The debate whether property is a limit on or the product of sovereignty envisages a tension between “the individual owner” and “the state.” But “the state” is not more than the aggregate of individuals who define theirs and others’ property rights through the state’s political process. The underlying tension between property and sovereignty is thus the tension between the economic market and the political market. Owners and others compete simultaneously at both levels to define, protect or improve the value of property. There are two ways to compete in the political marketplace: by engaging in either “high visibility politics” or “low visibility politics.” Diffuse owners rely on high visibility politics promoted by agents such as political parties or trade unions and on elections, referenda and the like, whereas smaller groups of owners prefer the low politics of capturing lawmakers and state executives.When economic markets became global at the end of the Cold War, so did the political markets: property rights increasingly became defined by international agreements, by decisions of international organizations, and by the exercise of “low politics” in foreign, weaker states. The global political markets were dominated by the executive branches of a handful of relatively strong states that, in turn, were responsive to the “low politics” of special interests. The high transaction costs of cooperation among diffuse owners inhibited the parallel rise of “high politics” at the global level. The skewed global political market for property continues to favor special interests, but there are budding attempts to reclaim the space for “high politics” by national regulators and courts. Current negotiations over the so-called “Mega Regional” agreements between the United States and its trading partners will, if successful, nip these buds as they render certain property rights almost immune to the subsequent challenges of high politics.

Finding and Defining the Carceral State Dan Berger (bio) Anne E. Parsons, From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration After 1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 221 pp. Map, graph, table, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Sometimes the simplest questions are also the hardest ones. Take, for instance, the time a few years ago when a colleague who, like me, works on the carceral state asked me a simple question following a conference panel about the carceral state: what is the carceral state? No one on the panel had actually defined the term. Indeed, it was in that moment that I realized how little of the published work or conference sessions on the topic engaged in this most basic act. What is it we are talking about? What are its parameters, its institutions, its ideologies? For my friend, this basic question invited a return to an earlier modality of state formation, the welfare state. How, she asked, is the carceral state different from the welfare state? Where and when does one end and the other begin? Do they coexist or compete? The obvious, inescapable truth of the colossal growth of incarceration in the late-twentieth-century United States was overdue for contextual analysis on political, social, economic, and cultural fronts by the time historians began to turn their attention to it. Yet, as often happens in the development of intellectual subfields, studies of the carceral state took for granted the core precept of what we looking at. As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, historians of the carceral state simply knew it when we saw it. More often than not, this intuitive approach to the topic focused on prison and explaining how the US came to lock up so many people for so long in such a relatively short period of time. This river was big enough for many scholars, junior and senior alike, to swim in. As the field has grown, scholars have explored both a longer time period and a wider set of institutions. Traveling along these various tributaries, as Anne E. Parsons does in her study of Pennsylvania institutions From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration After 1945, has shown that the path the U.S. took toward mass incarceration was multifaceted and multidirectional. This scholarship has shown the carceral state to be bigger than prisons and to be [End Page 279] the site of routine resistance and contestation by those caught in its grasp. But have we gotten closer to a working definition of what the carceral state is? Historians were rather late to the game of studying mass incarceration, which had already preoccupied scholars in Ethnic Studies, Political Science, Sociology, and elsewhere. And even as historians have turned greater attention to the history of prisons, policing, and surveillance, the field has remained robustly interdisciplinary. The carceral state is one of the subject areas—conservatism and capitalism being perhaps the other leading contenders—in which historians can best ply a critical interrogation of change over time to address matters of great social and political urgency in the present. The interest of historians in the carceral state has been both professional and public: flagship journals, Journal of American History and Journal of Urban History, dedicated themed issues to the topic in 2015, while a number of historical books on the topic of prisons and prisoners have won major awards from both professional associations and the larger book-reading public. Heather Ann Thompson's highly decorated history of the 1971 Attica rebellion, Blood in the Water (2016) is the most visible example of what has been a growing and often stunning list of titles investigating how it is that the US came to incarcerate so many people for so long in such cruel conditions. As abusive conditions, prisoner strikes, and policy reforms dot the current political landscape, a number of historians—myself included—have penned op-eds connecting our research to matters of ongoing public concern. Historians have productively followed the story of the carceral state across a variety of places and times. As U.S. criminal justice is largely a state-based affair...

This review essay on economist Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology argues that the role of financial professionals as ideologues is a necessary yet missing component of Piketty's analysis. Using the history of capitalism in the United States as a connective thread, the essay synthesizes examples from a broad array of studies to trace the role of financial professionals from the counting houses of early republic New Orleans and New York through the professionalization of stockbrokers and investment bankers in the late-19th century Gilded Age to modern-day Wall Street white-collar workers. Throughout U.S. history financial professionals and their allied media institutions have been ubiquitous and essential advocates for a “proprietarian” ideology which prioritizes the sanctity of property rights over ameliorating inequality. Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology offers a sprawling history of how conditions of economic inequality advance or constrain human progress. Casting aside arguments that economic growth lifts all boats, Piketty urges looking instead to political and ideological structures for a robust explanation of social development. The book's 17 chapters seek to establish a unified theory of social evolution at the nation-state level, developing a chronology and a terminology that proceeds from “ternary” systems of nobles, clerics, and peasants (a model Piketty fits to medieval and early modern societies from Western Europe to Japan) through the bourgeois capitalist regimes established in the eighteenth century and the social-democratic societies that arose in the wake of World War I, finally ending in a present-day surge in oligarchic populism that decries inequality while doing little, he argues, to reverse it. Particularly tragic, in Piketty's eyes, is that in recent history this shift has been accompanied by a “distinctive” meritocratic ideology which “blame[s] the poor for their poverty.” (Piketty, 2020, p. 710) Given Piketty's sociopolitical goals, Capital and Ideology's political vision suffers from often being free of ideologues. I argue that we might fill this gap by examining financial sector professionals as critical actors in establishing and defending “inequality regimes” (as Piketty terms them) throughout the past two centuries. Tracing the ideological work of financial professionals' in the United States from the early republic forward, I suggest we might discover fruitful continuities linking the development of new systems of capitalist knowledge in the Age of Revolutions with the social role of the present-day meritocracy.1 While Piketty's earlier book Capital in the Twenty-First Century was built on the argument that unregulated capitalism “automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities,” (Piketty, 2014, p. 1) the villain of the sequel is not capitalism per se but “proprietarian” ideology, a way of making sense of the world and shaping a given political regime to justify these inequalities whose first premise is “the sacralization of property rights,” as explained in the new book's brief glossary (1044). The first section of the book traces a long tradition of political arguments in many parts of the world devoted to refuting the idea that elites held unique responsibilities to the polity as a whole under the social contract. The third section of Capital and Ideology describes the “Great Transformation” which saw most of the North Atlantic democracies abandon the nineteenth-century liberal variation in the face of World War I and the Great Depression, followed by the steady return of inequality under neoliberal auspices from the 1970s onward. In the present day, Piketty is anxious about a possible move to a more malevolent “market nativism” which exploits xenophobia to dampen the appeal of redistributionist policy while entrenching tax systems which privilege existing wealth. In the final chapters, Piketty seeks to argue that only “exceptional taxes on private capital” can fund the reinvigoration of social democracy and ensure progress (886–891). Piketty, in other words, is interested in capital—whether vested in control over economic outputs through ownership rights or represented in the (usually monetized) returns on those outputs, rather than capitalism—the systems of extraction, negotiation, coercion, and cooperation that produce those returns and ownership structures (Levy, 2017). Piketty devotes particular attention to French history to examine the intertwining of income inequality and the defense of property rights. In the fourth chapter, he offers a counterintuitive argument that the French Revolution, notwithstanding the toppling of the monarchy and the landowning nobility, entrenched property relationships more firmly than they had ever been before by severing ownership (particularly of land) from civil authority, enhancing the legitimacy of “modern property rights.” (105) The removal of “privileges and charges” and “establish[ing] equal access to different occupations and to property rights” were considered sufficient to ensure the desired goal of an egalitarian society (118). Changes in the sources of wealth of the country's largest fortunes, and the absence of political pressure to redistribute the country's prosperity through the tax code, however, meant that by the late nineteenth century income inequality had already risen to levels like those of the pre-revolutionary era. Nonetheless it was important for Third Republic politicians to insist that France was “a country of ‘smallholders’” (139) yet Piketty's detailed quantitative studies of income and property show the distribution of wealth barely budged for the poorest 90% of the country from 1780 until 1910, and that their cumulative total rarely reached above 50% of income or 20% of property (130–131). In shifting focus from capitalism to property, Piketty seeks to trace the longer history of the ideological argument that the social conditions capitalism creates can be justified by the resulting distribution of property. Piketty describes ideology as “attempts… to impose meaning” from above. To study ideology, he focuses on formal political speech, found in party platforms and governmental debates; he also turns to “theorists and political actors to see how inequalities were justified.” (14) His attention is drawn most, as in the 11th chapter (the book's longest), to those political parties which were in the vanguard of creating the “incomplete equality” regimes that triumphed in Western democracies in the mid-twentieth century, from the German Social Democratic Party to the Democratic Party in the United States to the workers' parties of Scandinavia (486–508). Piketty is clearly more sympathetic to these political groups, and seems fascinated, for example, by the transformations that have taken the Democrats from a party dominated by southern slaveholders to the vehicle for supplanting the inequality regime of industrial ownership societies through the New Deal to, eventually, a party of the “brahmin left” identified with “serving the interests of the highly educated rather than the disadvantaged.” (834). This choice of focus, however, means that attentiveness to the conditions of inequality proprietarian ideology creates in everyday life, and how these conditions hold together a broad coalition of supporters, is largely missing. The lack of this analysis seems to be an important gap in Piketty's mission to overturn inequality in mass-suffrage societies. At the end of the book, he offers an outline of a new “participatory socialism” (1016–1022) operating through government action alongside transformations in workforce relationships, judicial systems, and global institutions to overturn the prevailing inequality regime. An analysis of how what might be called “proprietarian” coalitions” are assembled would seem to be an important task to determine what set of political conditions might overturn proprietarian ideology. Without understanding how political movements which prioritize the preservation of the wealth and privilege of a tiny elite organize larger followings, it seems likely Piketty's political mission will fail. Building political power and momentum for proprietarian coalitions depends, in other words, on ideologues. I would argue that we can find these ideologues who are so important for Piketty's argument if we focus on the financial professionals and clerks who mediated global and local exchange. By “financial professionals” I mean actors as varied as the attorneys of the bankruptcy bar, the stockbrokers who developed new genres of literature to reach potential investors, the real estate agents who facilitated international property development schemes and pioneered local housing markets, and the mortgage bankers who created new forms of securitized finance (Coffee, 2006; Glotzer, 2020; Hornstein, 2005; Hyman, 2011; Knight, 2016; Ott, 2011; Skeel, 2001). Financial professionals' livelihood depended on innovation with respect to property: they were ever developing new instruments to represent claims on property and new ways of negotiating, verifying, and asserting these claims. Self-interest led them to be the vanguard of the proprietarian coalition. Financial professionals' reliance on income from intangible services and fees for dealing in abstract negotiable instruments paradoxically reinforced their devotion to proprietarian ideology. The appeal of proprietarian ideology to financial professionals can be traced back to the information problems of bourgeois capitalism in the Atlantic world. Absentee ownership of slave plantations, long-distance trade relationships, and interregional land development schemes all required investors to place significant trust in their partners and subordinates. Under these conditions, information asymmetries acted as a form of property; the ability to sell or trade “secrets” was an important element of building trust relationships that might lead to future profitable cooperation. The expertise necessary to keep accurate, reliable accounts, and the use of account books as a form of oversight, created a precarious dependence between business collaborators who might be separated by thousands of miles and communicated only over the course of weeks or months (Ditz, 2000; Rosenthal, 2018). Global reputation networks built on hierarchies of place knit together global ports and backwater outposts, ranging in scale from multi-branch banking houses to solitary speculators. From the circulation of information hierarchies of merit in turn emerged, adhering to individuals and eventually quantified in the records of credit agencies (Baskin, 1988; Beckert, 2014; Olegario, 2006). An account of proprietarian meritocracy in the United States might begin with considering how the early American republic, like the post-French revolution political settlement, sought to preserve property rights while removing “privileges and charges” and equalizing occupational opportunities. In practice, this depended on protecting investors who financed capitalist projects while encouraging a new cadre of risk-bearing entrepreneurs. Investors benefited from what Woody Holton has described as the “procreditor” Constitution, which ensured they would be able to recoup their loans by emboldening federal courts to strike down debtors' relief legislation (Holton, 2018). The launching of the new political system crystallized meritocracy along racial lines; in other words, rather than Piketty's argument that meritocracy arose in the industrial era “to justify social differences on the basis of individual abilities,” (710) the intertwining of ideas about racial capacity and economic capacity shaped a hierarchical vision of society which could encompass a wide range of prejudices from the individual merchant to the debt practices of foreign nations (Flandreau, 2016; Garrett-Scott, 2019; O’Malley, 2012; White, 2015). In the borderlands of bourgeois capitalism, ideologies of personal and financial risk were intertwined with the implantation of an economic culture arranged around finance. Opportunistic speculators in the Deep South benefited from the willingness of investors from Boston to Britain to fund land speculation and benefited from social hierarchies in the early republic that eased their infiltration as economic actors, enabling them to swindle native Creek families and other Indians who obtained little redress from the federal government (Saunt, 2019). The availability of credit and access to social networks to negotiate problems and overcome business stumbles were deeply rooted in ideologies which favored white, Protestant men, yet even among white men merit could be framed in embodied terms: as Kathryn Olivarius explains, “immunocapital” accrued to New Orleans businessmen who had survived yellow fever and served as “an explanatory tool for success or failure in commodity capitalism.” Northern clerks similarly measured their physical and digestive health against their peers to index their chances for success, with institutions like the Young Men's Christian Association providing opportunities for physical self-improvement alongside moral improvement (Lupkin, 2010; Olegario, 2006; Olivarius, 2019, quote p. 442; Zakim, 2018). The racially embodied meritocracy would continue to be an important component of career success even as new technologies like the telegram and the stock ticker modified the geographic scope of capitalism, and the scale of the potential profits, while the types of expertise men were expected to deploy in pursuit of such opportunities became more and more specialized. Eventually, embodied meritocracy would be transformed into educational meritocracy through the propagation of the undergraduate “college man,” preferably an athlete, as the ideal “corporate professional” (Bjelopera, 2005; Clark, 2010; Davis, 2000). An increasing number and variety of experts held themselves out as agents who could help resolve principals' monitoring problems. Professional associations provided one way of overcoming the problem of a proliferating number of experts while simultaneously serving as a launchpad for proprietarian coalitions. Members of these associations sought to establish their credibility through the production of broadly-circulating representations, or “technologies of trust” as Marc Flandreau has phrased it, creating forums for demonstrating and recognizing each other as honorable, reliable men. Because questions of how knowledge would be divided amongst different experts were still up for grabs, these associations were often marked by conjunctions of expertise which seem incongruous from present-day perspective: the Anthropological Society of London, for example, also served as a nexus point for the creation of the Corporation of Foreign Bondholders, an organization established by “debt vultures” to win British government backing for their campaigns to restructure payments on distressed foreign debt on profitable terms. The affinity between the two associations was derived from the idea that the kind of knowledge necessary for understanding foreign cultures was congruent with the kind of knowledge necessary for understanding foreign finance (Flandreau, 2016). Placing the financial sector at the center of the analysis of Capital and Ideology would make clearer the emergence of global hierarchies of merit. The expansion of capitalism depended on agents who commanded increasingly specialized bodies of knowledge, such as geologists advising on the location of lucrative coal and oil deposits (Lucier, 2008). The telegraph and the creation of a global communication infrastructure transformed capitalism by enabling an exponential shift in the projection of information across long distances and the scale of financial markets. It enabled communities of investors to congregate in newly imagined spaces and facilitated oversight across oceans and continents, whether British families invested in Baltimore real estate or American bankers who reshaped the Caribbean sugar industry (Glotzer, 2020; Hudson, 2017). New professions such as accountancy developed and the status hierarchy within existing professions, such as law, reshuffled as the most lucrative incomes were gathered by law firms whose senior partners specialized in putting together complex merger agreements and banking syndicate contracts while their entry-level associates fought to quash cases involving minimum wages, injury compensation, and social welfare more broadly in the name of protecting property rights (Auerbach, 1976; Preda, 2009; Wilkins, 1989). Economic growth within the United States also changed the hierarchy of relationships between different parts of the country. A larger number of financial centers developed but their orientation toward New York City grew over time. Increasing industrial prosperity threw off larger and larger profits, enabling the wealthiest investors and entrepreneurs to step aside from active management while generating salaries for an ever-wider range of professionals who asserted and protected claims on property. Bank directors in large cities no longer evaluated borrowers themselves but turned to credit experts; bank officials also made common cause with small-town commercial associations to win stronger creditor protections in the 1898 federal bankruptcy act. After the law's passage, credit professionals shared techniques to ensure debts were collected and that those who had not respected property rights were punished for failing “to protect the sanctity of the credit relation” (Hansen, 1998; Lamoreaux, 1994; Skeel, 2001; Smith, 2010, quotation p. 218). The widening and deepening of financial professional communities was matched in other professional sectors, such as medicine, creating opportunities for financial professionals to make alliances and expand the proprietarian coalition. All professionals faced the fact that much or all of their “capital” was their intangible intellect. The proliferation of professional associations made it possible to convert this intellectual property (so to speak) into state-sanctioned credentialing systems (licensing authorities, medical boards, etc.) with barriers to entry that preserved their advantages. In medicine and other fields these practices typically replicated existing hierarchies of gender and race (Schafer, 2014; Wiebe, 1962). Many elite financiers used philanthropy to preserve white, Protestant men's places in the colleges producing the new professional meritocracy, as Susie Pak has shown using the example of Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan & Co.; indeed, young college men could be found intervening as strikebreakers to uphold proprietarian ideology (Norwood, 2002; Pak, 2013). Professionals increasingly saw themselves as part of a worldwide meritocracy and used international expositions and literature exchanges as opportunities to circulate ideas for both reform and self-protection (Rosenberg, 2012). Financial professionals were key advocates for proprietarian ideology because its abstract premises dovetailed with their pragmatic priorities of protecting assets from taxation and promoting government policies to ensure asset liquidity—and thus transaction fees (Allen, 2015; Hansen, 2009). From time to time Piketty catches sight of the importance of systems of professional knowledge for creating and justifying global systems of inequality. Examining the portfolio composition of the top 1% of French estates during the belle époque, for example, Piketty notes the preponderance of foreign investment, including in French colonies, and alludes to the use of the mission civilisatrice to justify the economic these profitable A of the information infrastructure used to these however, is largely and other for example, to on their and on a foreign policy to ensure a robust for their p. 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Piketty's on the New Deal rather than the proprietarian ideologues means he an to how this became the launchpad for ideology. like and built media and political professional that up the cause of back taxation and that might The proprietarian coalition was able to and expand by making a meritocratic appeal to new professions established to the of the government and the from management and government to drawn to like and at who and The and of an American tradition of was critical to this in the success of the business and in their and their of taxes on the 2019; 2006; 2009; 2009). Nonetheless financial professionals to this the Wall Street section the role as the and Financial in the past as the most media for proprietarian ideology. is about social Piketty regimes from to to is ideological and because the and of inequality is not a however, not the that the professionals whose is at the of its not see their as of present-day financial the of young professionals who have from elite into entry-level on Wall on the of the meritocracy, notes that young the of and in and in part because of their of a with a much more 2009). a to how such through professional cultures not as but as a to precarious conditions be an important step for those to organize against and overturn the prevailing of wealth inequality. access enabled and by is a and at the German His fields of the history of Wall the history of the professions, and the history of

The articles published in this issue of the Journal help advance the debate on market reform in former socialist states. In our comment, besides dealing with data analysis issues, we suggest several ways to improve the level of debate about substantive issues. These suggestions include more attention to politics, including path dependence, and more attention to middle-level generalizations from other developing market societies.

Property rights of urban underground space in China: A public good perspective

THE LANDS WERE NOT EMPTY

In 1964 just over two hundred thousand Americans were in prison. Today that number reaches over two million. The question at the core of Elizabeth Hinton’s book From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime is, how did we get here? Her work demands a reconsideration of commonly held narratives about when and how mass incarceration started in modern America and who is responsible for its architecture. Hinton deepens our understanding of the historicization of violence and the criminalization of black youth in the twentieth century and places the role of the federal government at the heart of her study.Hinton situates the roots of the modern carceral state not in the Reagan era but over twenty years earlier in the midst of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. She examines LBJ’s pivot to his third war—the War on Crime—through the passage of the Law Enforcement Assistance Act and, a few years later, the Safe Streets Act of 1968, which together placed the federal government in the driver’s seat of multiple aspects of law enforcement, the judiciary, and imprisonment at the state and local level.Hinton’s book upends the common left-leaning lament that if only Vietnam hadn’t drained the War on Poverty . . . If only. Instead, it was the War on Crime that supplanted the War on Poverty. Launched by LBJ, the War on Crime became America’s domestic endless war, one where large swaths of the population lived peaceably outside the red zones while other Americans found their communities and families, and especially their youth, crushed by federal policies based on racist presumptions, scholarly reports and data, military technology, political strategies, and increasingly the possibility of profit. This War on Crime, with roots in John F. Kennedy’s efforts to tackle juvenile delinquency in the early 1960s, was a long-range response to demographic and economic shifts in American society, the civil rights movement, and urban unrest, a battle fought by Democrats and Republicans alike. “Crime control” was a bipartisan effort—the rare domestic-policy issue where conservatives and liberals found common ground.The War on Poverty to the War on Crime covers nearly fifty years of constructing American mass incarceration. Working chronologically, Hinton maps the federal policies which built and funded the carceral state as a response to perceived domestic threats, which politicians viewed through their white privilege and racist (intended or not) understanding of poverty and black America. Hinton traces the development, implementation, and consequences of these policies in three ways. First, she addresses the deep impact of “statistical discourse” and expert assessments of delinquency and the pathology of the black family on policy makers. Policies were racialized, including the ambitious social-welfare programs of the War on Poverty, that problematized families and communities without addressing structural inequalities. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s writings on what he described as the pathology of the black family were particularly foundational and offered a theoretical platform for merging social programming with crime fighting. As the nation’s cities erupted in violence in the 1960s, Johnson declared, “Effective law enforcement and social justice must be pursued together, as the foundation of our efforts against crime.” (74) From Lyndon Johnson to Ronald Reagan, presidents offered policies that identified crime control in one form or another as the critical key to solving the social troubles of urban America. These presidents all argued on a continuum firmly rooted in the notions that cultural pathology was the cause and that an expanded federal role in crime prevention was the solution.Secondly, Hinton investigates the implementation of these expansive federal programs, like the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, on local policing and incarceration. Expectations and funding at the federal level resulted in “creative” and highly racialized strategies for combating juvenile delinquency in particular. Across the decades, white youth were “troubled” while black youth were “criminals” or potential criminals. Local law-enforcement bodies were encouraged to substantially step up their surveillance and confinement of black urban youth and their space, identifying both as inherently dangerous and possibly contagious. The pathologies of both people and their neighborhoods demanded containment. While examples of youth sports leagues and teen clubs seemed quaint in comparison to the brutality of the later War on Drugs, these experiments in policing were opportunities for soft surveillance, profiling, and predatory policing and became parts of the increasing over-policing of black urban life. This over-policing occurred not only in the streets but also through education and housing policy as law enforcement became a permanent fixture in American schools, parks, community centers, and public housing. Law enforcement saturation was a strategy of restriction, containment, and removal. Whole geographic areas, demographic groups, and social spaces were criminalized and militarized as a consequence.Despite the massive growth of a technologically savvy law-enforcement and incarceration infrastructure, American policy makers presented their crime fighting as an uphill battle, one that demanded more and more resources, even as hard evidence on actual results was hard to come by. The mantra of “nothing works” in fighting urban crime or the rehabilitation of young black men or their neighborhoods ultimately placed the blame for urban crisis firmly on the shoulders of the residents of America’s inner cities, and, as Hinton points out, any rollback of support for the War on Crime was met with strident pushback from what had grown to be the “criminal justice community.” The federal government’s War on Crime was a strategy of social control designed to contain black urban America without addressing the fundamental economic and political inequities that caused urban poverty and crime. Deeply embedded racial attitudes were institutionalized with billions of dollars of federal funds as overwhelmingly white politicians sought to manage, but not solve, an American problem.Hinton builds these arguments chronologically and thematically. Through her treatment of these domestic wars, she uncovers the interplay between federal policy, social movements, and urban unrest, on the one hand, and professional and political narratives about black America, on the other. Her analysis teases out the continuity across Democratic and Republican administrations as she shifts her lens across urban spaces. By the end of the twentieth century, Hinton argues, federal policies and programs, some initially designed to help poor communities, made black urban poverty synonymous with criminality. In the last five years mainstream Americans have increasingly been forced to recognize the monolithic mass-incarceration system that serves as America’s own colonial overlord of a huge segment of its people. The question will be what shall be done? What acts of resistance can we uncover? How do we understand this massive federal infrastructure in regional terms? How has the militarization of law enforcement reshaped our perceptions of space and community? How do we understand the criminalization of black America through federal policy alongside other arenas of surveillance and incarceration—such as immigration and antiterrorism programs? How are these policies gendered? How do they serve new sectors of the economy?

Klantgestuurd voorraadbeleid en empowerment. Over Te Woon en andere initiatieven van woningcorporaties

Klantgestuurd voorraadbeleid en empowerment. Over Te Woon en andere initiatieven van woningcorporaties

Klantgestuurd voorraadbeleid en empowerment. Over Te Woon en andere initiatieven van woningcorporaties

Klantgestuurd voorraadbeleid en empowerment. Over Te Woon en andere initiatieven van woningcorporaties

Klantgestuurd voorraadbeleid en empowerment. Over Te Woon en andere initiatieven van woningcorporaties

Klantgestuurd voorraadbeleid en empowerment. Over Te Woon en andere initiatieven van woningcorporaties