City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965 (Justice, Power, and Politics)
City of Inmates traces the making of confinement in Los Angeles through colonization, Indigenous dispossession, immigration control, and the governance of Black and Latinx communities. It shows how urban growth and the politics of human caging were inseparable.
Work Information
A rereading of Los Angeles history through the long shadow of confinement.
From the eighteenth through the twentieth century, the book links jails, labor, policing, and immigration administration in Los Angeles. It presents modern mass incarceration not as a sudden phenomenon but as a governing technique built over time by city and state.
Review Summaries
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The book is praised for combining deep archival research with a long historical frame. It works both as urban history and carceral studies, while the breadth of violence it covers leaves a heavy aftereffect.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Univ of North Carolina Pr
- Published
- 2017-04-10
- Pages
- 301 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 16.51 x 2.54 x 24.13 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781469631189
- ISBN-10
- 9781469631189
- Price
- 36405 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Politics & Social Sciences/Social Sciences/Specific Demographics/African American Studies
Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation's carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.
Kelly Lytle Hernandez is associate professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Reviews
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This is the best study to date of the history of incarceration in Los Angeles. It shows how LA has become the incarceration capitol of the U.S., with most of those currently incarcerated being people of color, particularly Black people. Hernández takes us from the early native communities where human caging was unknown, through the Spanish colonists who built a jail as one of their first structures soon filled with the native people, to the modern carceral state. A riveting and revealing read.
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I have read a lot of good studies of the history of race, policing and incarceration. City of Inmates stands out in every way. It is beautifully written, remarkably conceived and built on a bedrock of research. It tells a story about the arc of injustice in Los Angeles and ends with powerful testimonies by today’s activist who offer some hope of a better day ahead.
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Good book. Good quality . Fast shipping
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Kelly Lyle Hernandez is a must read. This book gives you history of the carceral system. History that is often left out or intentionally erased. 100% worth.
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I really enjoyed this book. Tons of history to understand the present.