Description
Book SynopsisLos 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.
Trade ReviewOffers a radically new perspective . . . .
City of Inmates demonstrates incontrovertibly that the systems of immigrant exclusion and mass incarceration emerged together and fed each other." -
The Metropole"By widening the historical frame, [Hernandez] offers the reader a deeper, more complex, and more historically nuanced view of incarceration. An essential contribution to critical prison studies (CPS)." -
H-Net Reviews"Details how successive authoritarian powers in present-day Los Angeles have targeted and captured people using cages to create what is now one of the world's largest prison societies, and ends with a call for it to be destroyed." -
The New Inquiry"
City of Inmates is a story of removal and dispossession. It is a story of environmental transformation with the use of a subjugated work force (chain gangs). And it is the story of the rise of the human cage--an object that has been both a tool of removal from the land and a racialized environment itself." -
Environmental History"A beautifully narrated, deeply insightful historical assessment of the dynamics of American settler colonialism. . . . Remarkable for the depth and breadth of the research that undergirds each of its narratives." -
Journal of American History"An astoundingly original evaluation of the central place of incarceration in the history of Los Angeles. . . .
City of Inmates is a book that should be read by every person seriously concerned with the question of how we got to where we are, and where we might go from here." -
Pacific Historical Review"Marshaling more than two centuries of historical data, Hernandez finds that native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of mass incarceration in Los Angeles from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion." -
Law & Social Inquiry"Convincingly demonstrates that the history of American prisons indexes major social and political battles of the country's history." -
Western Historical Quarterly"An incisive and meticulously researched study of the transformation of Los Angeles from a small group of Native American communities in the 18th century into an Aryan city of the sun in the 20th." -
Los Angeles Review of Books"Hernandez puts in perspective the arrests, convictions, and incarceration for one city that contributes to the US being the carceral capital of the world. Recommended."-
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