Journal of Urban History

This article contributes to the scholarship on mass incarceration by highlighting the ways penal expansion intervened in the history of other state institutions. It argues that the increasing criminalization of welfare fraud was instrumental in undermining political support for key social welfare programs, particularly Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). In the 1970s, lawmakers and welfare administrators enlisted law enforcement’s expanding authority to contain growing welfare costs and counter demands from the welfare rights movement. It was from these anti-welfare fraud campaigns that the racialized caricature of the “welfare queen” entered the political lexicon. Recruiting the criminal justice system further stigmatized AFDC recipients by positioning them as criminally suspect, financially secure, and morally unworthy. I argue that while increased penalties for welfare fraud did not swell the penal system to the same extent as initiatives like the War on Drugs, they shaped popular knowledge about poor families and undermined faith in the state’s capacity to mitigate inequality.

In the midst of several well publicized prison scandals, numerous lawsuits and a mass of studies revealing the squalid nature of U.S. prisons, in the early 1960s and 1970s Delaware was one of a handful of states experimenting with fresh alternatives to incarceration utilizing urban space. The leader of these reform efforts was Paul Keve, acting Delaware Commissioner of Corrections. Keve’s ambitious program was to be anchored in the state’s two largest cities, Wilmington and Dover, where he hoped to use the opportunities afforded by the urban landscape to facilitate and enhance his program of rehabilitation. Keve’s program, however, met with crushing opposition from Delaware’s two rural southern counties who controlled the state legislature. This essay examines the tumultuous history of the period by looking at the state as a microcosm of the nation and how heated discourse over prison reform intersected with the battle to control urban space and how issues of race and Delaware’s political geography ultimately defeated prison reform.

This case study of Los Angeles County portrays the war on drugs during the 1950s as a racial and spatial project that combined tough mandatory-minimum sentences for urban “pushers” and Mexican American “gangsters” with discretionary loopholes for white suburban “victims” of the heroin and marijuana markets. State institutions, media scripts, and white middle-class organizations constructed illegal drug use as a suburban crisis through a racialized pusher–victim discourse that collectively criminalized minority youth while decriminalizing white teenage lawbreakers. The escalation of California’s antinarcotics crusade during the postwar decades illuminates the deep historical roots, thoroughly bipartisan policies, and grassroots suburban politics that shaped the rise of mass incarceration and the continuing racial and spatial inequalities of drug war enforcement in modern America.

Beginning with the Johnson administration, this article examines the development of the juvenile justice system and the subsequent criminalization of African American youth and the urban spaces they inhabited. Soon after Lyndon Johnson called for the “War on Crime” in 1965, federal officials merged the social welfare and law enforcement measures of the Great Society in new and innovative ways. The administration designed programs such as Youth Service Bureaus to reign in potential lawbreakers as well as offer assistance to troubled youth. As federal policymakers expanded the reach and resources of the Bureaus and other juvenile delinquency programs during the 1970s, they required youth employment initiatives, public schools, and grassroots organizations to partner with juvenile courts, police departments, and correctional facilities to receive funding. Following the enactment of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, however, the ongoing absorption of social service initiatives by crime control programs rapidly escalated. The legislation created a national justice system for young offenders and formally labeled all economically vulnerable youth “potentially criminal.” In an attempt to control future crime, the terms of the 1974 Act diffused crime control techniques into the everyday lives of black urban children, yielding new possibilities for supervision in public schools, housing projects, and within families on welfare. By the end of the 1970s, the United States had the highest youth incarceration rate of any industrialized nation as a result of this uniquely punitive approach to urban social programs.

It was in big-city municipal government that American gays and lesbians first won political power. This article reinterprets the rise of urban gay politics, emphasizing the complex and changing relationship between gay activists, policing, and the politics of law and order. Drawing on evidence and examples from Chicago, Stewart-Winter examines such developments as the decline of gay bar raids, the implementation of police sensitivity training programs, clashes between police and AIDS activists, and the hiring of openly gay police officers. He argues that developments in the late twentieth century set the stage for more recent tensions within LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) movements, as activists of color challenged the reconciliation between state power and predominantly white activist organizations.

This essay places the Chicano Movement at the center of a struggle over prisoners’ rights and the construction of carceral states. It chronicles the prisoners’ rights movement through the lens of two urban Chicano prisoner activists incarcerated on rural prison farms - Fred Cruz and David Ruíz. It recounts the intellectual and political evolution of Fred Cruz, a native of San Antonio, who promoted social justice by embracing the law, traditions of civic nationalism, and American constitutionalism. It also considers the more politicized path of David Ruíz, a native of Austin and the author of the nation’s longest civil rights trial, Ruiz v. Estelle (1978-1980). His turn to radicalization linked the legal effort for prisoners’ rights with the wider Chicano movement outside of prison walls.

As a study of urban Chicanos incarcerated on rural prison farms, this article demonstrates how geographical dislocation allowed Chicano prisoners to imagine their coerced geographic dislocation as analogous to the ways in which slavery uprooted African communities. In the American southwest, the coerced dislocation of urban minorities meant that rural prisons received a rising number of Mexican American prisoners who carried with them into prison their experience as city dwellers exposed to an urban Chicano radicalism and also as exploited workers for the vast agricultural empire of the Southwest. By offering an analysis of the ways in which Mexican Americans pioneered the prisoners’ rights movement in Texas, this article serves as a reminder that Latino/a prisoners constitute an essential cornerstone to social justice movements that confronted the construction of carceral states.

Historians generally agree that American suburbanization began in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, brought on by a combination of technological innovation (particularly in transportation), economic restructuring, and changing tastes of the urban middle classes. Essential to this process was the rise of a suburban real estate industry, which converted agricultural land into a consumer commodity. Using a microhistorical study of a single farm in the Boston suburb of Brookline, Massachusetts, the origins of the process of suburban land development are examined from 1770 to 1850. Land records, local history, and genealogical information were used to reconstruct the process by which farm land became the site of suburban neighborhoods. Before 1840, when nearly all land transactions were between individuals who knew each other personally, there was no infrastructure of real estate professionals and developers to facilitate suburban growth. During the 1840s, sales between strangers, facilitated by agents or auctioneers, quickly became the norm, and residential subdivisions aimed at varying income levels appeared, accompanied by developers and builders. Land went from being the essential component of family farming to a general commodity freely bought and sold, part of the broader evolution of the American economy into one dominated by market-based industrial and financial capitalism.

This article discusses the politics of public space through the particular example of Taksim Square in Istanbul. Tracing Taksim’s history since the early twentieth century, the article analyzes the instrumentalization of public space in nation-building, the socialization of politics within the context of postwar rapid urbanization, and the (re)politicization of public space under neoliberal Islamism. Finally it arrives at an assessment of the nation-wide antigovernment protests that centered on Taksim Square in May–June 2013. Throughout this historical examination, the politics of public space is discussed with reference to the work of Henri Lefebvre, in order to scrutinize the spatial aspects of the relation between state and society. Accordingly, the rise of democratic public space is defined as a result of the mutual interaction between two bottom-up impetuses; the immanent politics of the social (the political character of everyday life) and the socialization of the political (civil political action).

This article aims to establish the Taipei walkup apartment building as a case of the modern vernacular. Taipei walkups were the first type of multistoried multifamily housing in Taiwan, originating in the 1960s and continuing to dominate Taipei’s cityscape today. We examine the political and economic influences of the United States on the birth of this type of housing architecture in Taiwan and, by further exploring vernacular elements applied to the buildings’ façades, point to the important role that local building culture played in the adoption and transfiguration of this modernist architecture. The article provides an example of the interactions between the modern and the vernacular, arguing that it is rather hard to defend the position that these are two entirely discrete categories.