Nixon's War on Crime and the Rise of Federal Carceral Measures

My paper argues that the Nixon Administration and Congress restructured the American system of criminal justice by enacting legislation that militarized urban police forces. It reflects upon the post-civil rights shift from a national social agenda premised on community action and combating unemployment to an agenda premised on crime control and fighting disorder. This reorientation of domestic policy is critical to understanding the emergence of what some scholars refer to as the American carceral state. The federal and municipal programs spawned by Nixon’s War on Drugs restricted Black Power activists and unleashed punitive and juridical mechanisms for social control that laid the groundwork for the mass imprisonment of the late twentieth century.
    I view federal investment in law enforcement from 1968 to 1973 as part of the domestic policy response to the outcomes of the civil rights movement and increasingly prominent strains of black radicalism. Nixon reacted to Black Power and widespread urban civil disorder by supporting legislation that allowed the federal government to claim jurisdiction in local criminal matters through bloc grants. Black residents and activists in Los Angeles soon confronted a police force that received a disproportionate share of these funds. I discuss how the Los Angeles Police Department, at the cutting edge of technological and business management principles, worked extensively with federal criminal justice agencies. By exploring how the punitive weapons of Nixon’s War on Drugs created a political vacuum in South Central, my paper offers critical historical context to understanding the increased crime rates of the early 1970s. And in examining the way Nixon’s domestic social war played out in the street wars of Los Angeles, my paper seeks ultimately to provide a composite local and national perspective on the ways in which the aims of Black Power were compromised by federal carceral measures.