While the United States contains less than five percent of the planet’s population, it has nearly one-quarter of the world’s prison population.  Elizabeth Hinton traces the politics and policy decisions since President Lyndon’s Johnson’s War on Poverty that created the nation’s reliance on mass incarceration.

Elizabeth Hinton is Professor in the Departments of History and 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.  In her award-winning book, “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America,” Hinton examines the implementation of federal law enforcement programs beginning in the mid-1960s that made the United States home to the largest prison system in world history.  It has received numerous awards, including being named to the New York Times’s 100 notable books of 2016.