Chapter 1. The First Civil Right: Protection from Lawless Racial
Violence
Chapter 2. Freedom from Fear: White Violence, Black Criminality,
and the Ideological Fight for Law-and-Order
Chapter 3. Policing the Great Society: Modernizing Law Enforcement
and Rehabilitating Criminal Sentencing
Chapter 4. The Era of Big Punishment: Mandatory Minimums, Community
Policing, and Death Penalty Bidding Wars
Chapter 5. The Last Civil Right: Freedom from State-Sanctioned
Racial Violence
Naomi Murakawa is Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.
"This brilliant book provides persuasive arguments and powerful
analysis of how racial liberals deploy racial pity and 'neutral'
administrative procedures to entrench images of black criminality
and expand the US carceral state. Murakawa stands in the lineage of
Angela Davis, Loic Waquant and Michelle Alexander in laying bare
the disturbing contradiction between American ideals of criminal
justice and American practices of state-sanctioned carceral
violence
against black people."
-- Cornel West
"Naomi Murakawa's indispensable, highly anticipated book
convincingly challenges conventional wisdom about the origins of US
'law and order' society. Like other civil rights reforms, criminal
justice policy was designed and successively expanded over the
post-WWII decades by liberals invested in narrow, racially neutral
processes and fair procedures, but largely indifferent to a world
of broad, racially disparate outcomes. Protection from arbitrary
violence -
the liberal's first civil right - was the touchstone for a policy
regime that continued to advance invidious associations of
blackness and criminal behavior. Under this big tent, seemingly
opposite
racial politics converged to build the world's largest, most
racially unequal, carceral state."
--Nikhil Pal Singh, New York University, author of Black is a
Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy
"While most scholars agree that the roots of our current carceral
state lay in law and order policies, Murakawa traces those policies
to unlikely sources - the liberal Truman administration in its
efforts to protect African Americans from mob and police violence.
While the state did little to enforce such protections, it
bequeathed our nation a criminal justice architecture that fueled
mass incarceration. The First Civil Right not only overturns
received wisdom, but reveals that 'racial liberalism' is not the
solution but part of the problem."
--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical
Imagination
"Tackling one of the most important topics of our time, this
sharply-argued, richly-researched, and tough-minded book exposes
the roots of our carceral state. In highlighting ideology, liberal
as well as conservative, as well as putatively neutral ideas and
procedures, The First Civil Right compellingly marries policy
analysis and studies of race to a penetrating account of
officially-sanctioned racial cruelty."
--Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and
History, Columbia University
"With scrupulous attention to historical detail, Murakawa tracks
the growth of the prison industrial complex" and "makes a powerful
case...for viewing bipartisan solutions to present dilemmas with
extreme skepticism."
-- James Kilgore, Truthout
"[A]n incredibly important and long overdue challenge to the idea
that law and order conservatives exclusively conspired to build a
prison nation... [A]n unprecedented examination of how liberal
racism undermines and appropriates movements for social
justice."
-- Sara Benson, Punishment & Society
"The best scholarship explores compelling topics, offers
provocative, often counterintuitive arguments, and does so in a
timely manner. Typically, political science research fails on one
or more counts. Not so with Naomi Murakawa's The First Civil Right,
which explores the policy and political underpinnings of U.S. mass
incarceration. Given Murakawa's exhaustive research, she clearly
began researching the book years ago. Yet it could hardly have
arrived at a
more opportune time."
-- Jeffrey Smith, Political Science Quarterly
"[A] big, important book on the carceral state that will be a
touchstone for discussions of race, liberalism, and penal reform
for years to come."
-- Marie Gottschalk, Perspectives on Politics
"[A] remarkable investigation into the historical relationship
between postwar liberalism and the growth of mass
incarceration."
-- Mike Konczal, Dissent
"The singularly ambitious contribution of The First Civil Right is
that it meticulously documents the important role that the liberal
'law and order' ideology played in constructing the foundations on
which the carceral state was built..L. Murakawa reminds us that
liberals, too, were strategic actors in this period; in ignoring
the political Left, we have missed 'liberal racial criminalization
that thrived in the full light of day."
-- Amy Lerman and Vesla Weaver, Perspectives on Politics
"[A]n invaluable addition to the history of the carceral state...
It is particularly in Murakawa's critique of death penalty
abolition strategies that we see what the book ultimately argues
for: a far more radical form of political will and activism than we
have seen so far."
-- Yasmin Nair, AlterNet
"The brilliant insight of Murakawa's book is to locate today's
enforcement of white supremacy in the tools devised by liberals for
'solving' the problem of violent, extralegal racism... procedural
fairness, race-neutral machinery, and formal equality."
-- Willie Osterweil, The Nation
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