Naomi Murakawa - The First Civil Right

There has been an explosive rise in the U.S. incarceration rate in the second half of the twentieth century, and a racial transformation of the prison population from mostly white at mid-century to sixty-five percent black and Latino in 2015. Many believe that this shift began with the "tough on crime" policies advocated by Republicans and Southern Democrats beginning in the late 1960s, which sought longer prison sentences, more frequent use of the death penalty, and the explicit or implicit targeting of politically marginalized people.

In The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, Naomi Murakawa inverts the conventional wisdom by arguing that the expansion of the federal carceral state - a system that disproportionately imprisons blacks and Latinos - was rooted in the civil-rights liberalism of the 1940s and early 1960s. Murakawa traces the development of the modern American prison system through several presidencies, both Republican and Democrat.  What began as a liberal initiative to curb the mob violence and police brutality that had deprived racial minorities of their first civil right --physical safety - eventually evolved into the federal correctional system that now deprives them, in unjustly large numbers, of another important right: freedom. 

Naomi Murakawa is an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She studies the reproduction of racial inequality in 20th and 21st century American politics, with specialization in crime policy and the carceral state. Her work has appeared in Law & Society Review, Theoretical Criminology, Du Bois Review, and several edited volumes. She has received fellowships from Columbia Law School’s Center for the Study of Law and Culture, as well the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Policy Research Program. Prior to joining African American Studies at Princeton, she taught in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. Professor Murakawa received her B.A. in women’s studies from Columbia University, her M.Sc. in social policy from the London School of Economics, and her Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.  

 

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The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (Studies in Postwar American Political Development) By Naomi Murakawa Cover Image
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ISBN: 9780199892808
Published: Oxford University Press, USA - August 11th, 2014