Robert Perkinson: Lessons from the history of the prison boom

In March 1965, at the height of his popularity and power, President Johnson launched a major offensive against crime, which he called a “malignant enemy in America.” Although violent crime had declined markedly since the Great Depression, it was starting to surge under Johnson’s watch, and his conservative critics—following the lead of Barry Goldwater, who had made fighting crime a centerpiece of his failed but galvanizing presidential bid—were eager to pounce. To outflank them, LBJ ordered his attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach to chair a blue-ribbon commission to draft a national crime strategy. “I will not be satisfied,” the President warned, borrowing from Goldwater’s paternalistic playbook, “until every woman and child in this Nation can walk any street, enjoy any park . . . and live in any community at any time of the day or night without fear of being harmed.” He declared “a thorough and effective war against crime.”

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, Johnson’s belligerent anticrime talk rings familiar, but the policy changes ultimately put forward by his expert panel in 1967 hail, seemingly, from another country. Nowhere among the Katzenbach commission’s 200-plus recommendations were the sorts of punitive fixes presently in vogue. Rather than augmenting law-enforcement powers, the panelists urged greater respect for civil liberties and a national commitment to police fairness and professionalism, complete with in-service training courses like “The civil rights movement and history of the Negro.” Instead of strengthening the hands of prosecutors, the commissioners recommended greater evidence sharing, eliminating most bail charges, and expanding legal services for low-income defendants. Instead of tougher criminal sentencing, they suggested rolling back mandatory-minimum drug penalties passed in the 1950s and shifting resources from imprisonment to probation and parole.

Although the panelists advocated more money for law enforcement and criminological research, they insisted, above all, that “the challenge of crime in a free society” could only be met by stressing prevention over punishment. “We will not have dealt effectively with crime until we have alleviated the conditions that stimulate it,” they wrote. Reflecting what would become an unfashionable belief that government intervention can alleviate social problems by means other than tax cuts or privatization, the president’s advisors asserted that the Great Society represented the best solution to crime:

[The Commission] has no doubt whatever that the most significant action that can be taken against crime is action designed to eliminate slums and ghettos, to improve education, to provide jobs, to make sure every American is given the opportunities and the freedoms that will enable him to assume his responsibilities.

Rather than building cellblocks, they called for building communities. Throwing down the gauntlet before the incipient law-and-order Right, LBJ’s best and brightest called “for a revolution in the way America thinks about crime.”

What they got was counterrevolution. By 1968, when the report was translated into law, Lyndon Johnson’s once formidable social-democratic coalition had fragmented, a casualty not only of Vietnam but of the riotous, long, hot summers at home. The domestic homicide rate was soaring, and as public anxiety mounted, resurgent Republicans and southern segregationist Democrats took control of the crime issue in Congress, drafting sweeping legislation that bore little resemblance to Johnson’s. Instead of crafting myriad federal programs, the revised bill would channel some $400 million into locally controlled “block grants” for law enforcement, a nod to states’ rights. Instead of “warring on poverty,” as the commissioners urged, the congressional package took aim at the Warren Court, eliminating restrictions on wiretapping and authorizing police to interrogate suspects without the pesky involvement of defense attorneys (Miranda v. Arizona had been decided in 1966)....