This extraordinary book analyzes changing state-level policies toward drugs, welfare, and incarceration in the 1970s in the US, revealing connections between welfare and imprisonment as institutions of social regulation. . . . Drawing on statements and letters from officials, activists, prisoners, welfare recipients, and concerned citizens, Kohler-Hausmann illuminates the often contradictory and always contingent dialogues through which 'tough' policies were ... Read morelegitimized and enacted. . . . The inclusion of so many voices leads to a lively and engaging read.
Choice U.S. history is experiencing a wave of new work on the political and social history of incarceration. The right book at the right time, Getting Tough stands out among its peers for its examination of drug policy and sentencing alongside the transformation of the welfare state. In addition to being a critical history of mass incarceration, this book offers a significant reinterpretation of the 1970s, the decade when the wars on drugs and welfare overlapped in a larger war on the poor.
Robert O. Self, author of All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s Getting Tough makes important, creative interventions in major debates regarding political history, social policy formation, the origins of mass incarceration, and the links between the carceral and welfare states. The insights of the book's three case studies are powerful and sophisticated and provide the foundation for a pioneering reassessment of the prevailing narratives regarding law-and-order politics and criminalization during the 1960s and 70s.
Matthew Lassiter, University of Michigan This is an original, sweeping look at the political history of policies within the criminal justice and welfare domain, and the political choices that transformed the nation's approach to the poor. Most books either deal with the history of public assistance or the history of penal and sentencing reforms. Getting Tough goes further than any other book to document the interplay of dominant state approaches in both arenas.
Vesla M. Weaver, Yale University Compelling and deeply illuminating, Getting Tough chronicles the contingent historical processes that gave rise to mass incarceration and welfare-state retrenchment. Kohler-Hausmann deftly juxtaposes the political battles over welfare, drug, and sentencing policies that played out across American states during the 1970s, revealing how and why state policymakers advanced increasingly punitive and coercive approaches to managing marginalized populations. Skillfully integrating top-down and bottom-up perspectives, Kohler-Hausmann reveals that get-tough policies were not simply a response to a conservative shift in public opinion, they also helped produce it. This excellent book is a must-read.
Cybelle Fox, author of Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal Getting Tough is an extraordinary gift to all of us who have long tried to make sense of how the United States came to build one of the world's most punitive carceral states, so closely on the heels of having constructed a redistributive welfare state. Examining the complex histories and sensibilities of political elites, grassroots activists, and voters, while illuminating the lived experiences of drug sellers, welfare recipients, and prisoners, Kohler-Hausmann profoundly upends how we understand the political, cultural, and social transformations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book is nothing short of pathbreaking.
Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy In her groundbreaking book, Kohler-Hausmann draws important new connections between penal and social welfare policy and debunks common assumptions about poverty, crime, and drug use in the process. Getting Tough transforms the way we view the late twentieth-century United States and speaks to the problems at the center of American democracy today.
Elizabeth Hinton, author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America One of CHOICE's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2017 A vital reminder that reactionary ideas gestate at the local level before they get nationalized. And, with enough organizing, so too might emancipatory ones.
-Dan Berger, Truthout Honorable Mention for the 2018 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians Show Less