Tough on Crime: The Liberal Roots of Punishment and Incarceration

In the last two decades, scholars in a variety of disciplines have explored at length the use of crime and “law and order” in the postwar rise of the Right. They have shown how Republican presidents, such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and conservative states, such as California, injected crime into national politics after 1968 and passed increasingly harsh legislation that led to the growth of the carceral state. Yet, conservatives were not the only architects of this movement. Using gang violence as a lens, this paper will explore how liberal Democrats made crime a political issue as early as the late 1950s. It will first explore how Democrats in New York implemented new legislation in the late 1950s to address rising rates of delinquency and gang violence by incarcerating juvenile gang members and punishing the parents of delinquents. Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson followed New York’s lead and brought the issue to the national stage in the early 1960s. Through the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act of 1961, the Juvenile Delinquency Prevention and Control Act of 1968, the Mobilization for Youth program, and the War on Poverty, Kennedy and Johnson made gang crime a federal issue and implemented strategies to contain its spread. By highlighting the role of politicians from the Left in addressing crime at the state and federal level, this paper argues that scholars must expand their focus ideologically and temporally to find the real beginning point of the carceral state’s rise. Not only was the punitive turn a project of the Left, but it also predated the traditional “law and order” movement of 1968 by more than a decade.