War on Poverty

In 1964, shortly after the Civil Rights Act became effective, several riots broke out in major cities including Rochester, Philadelphia, and most the most commonly known Harlem. Now all three were sparked by different events, but ultimately, they all represented the same thing: resisting the discriminatory state of the police and the social injustice that African Americans have endured for decades. Earlier that year President Lyndon B. Johnson had launched a set of programs called The Great Society to fight the war on poverty. President Johnson believed this Great Society would cure racial injustice due to the equal opportunity programs and civil rights legislation that it provided therefore, seeing the riots as a criminal act. “The uprisings exposed the tensions that existed between law enforcement officers and residents in segregated urban neighborhoods…despite civil rights reform and the unprecedented War on Poverty... monumental federal actions had failed to resolve entrenched inequality and everyday racism within American institutions… Rather than critically examine the deeper causes of urban unrest, Johnson declared that "the immediate overriding issue in New York is the preservation of law and order" (Hinton, "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America," 56).

In 1965, eight months after the riots in Harlem, President Johnson signed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act. This made funds available to States and private organizations to better the system of law enforcement. Along with this act the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance (OLEA) was established. The OLEA used federal grants to fund various training programs, weapons caches, and new technology in data-gathering in low-income neighborhoods. Riots continued in Newark and Detroit in response to police brutality of an African American cab driver and show of force when police raided a bar celebrating soldiers coming home from Vietnam.

This led to the Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. This act formed the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) evolving from the OLEA which brought about a block-grant system that encouraged individual States to build an arsenal for the police force. “As such, under the direction of Katzenbach, the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance (OLEA) invested the vast majority of the federal crime-control funds in local police departments, private firms, and social science researchers working to improve urban surveillance and patrol strategies.” (Hinton, “A War within Our Own Boundaries”: Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State, 103). 4). This block-grant system helped fund 75 percent of the cost for “hardware” and patrol programs and 40 percent of the cost for programs for police-community relations.

This is where we start to the germination of the carceral state on three fronts; law-enforcement, judicial proceedings, and the handling of convicted felons. The LEAA had a mission from the White House was “to expand supervision and control in low-income urban communities.” (Hinton, "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America," 3). This mission combined with the shared assumptions about crime, poverty, and African Americans across federal policymakers, the aims of the War on Poverty became blurred. This began the era of the War on Crime.