Tongva peoples indigenous to southern California, white “tramps,” Chinese laborers, Mexican revolutionaries, and black workers rendered redundant are peoples who have been targeted for incarceration in Los Angeles, Kelly Lytle Hernández explains, and this is why City of Inmates is not just another book lamenting mass incarceration. It is, instead, a beautifully narrated, deeply insightful historical assessment of the dynamics of American settler colonialism that give Los Angeles the distinction of “imprisoning more people than any other city in the United States” (p. 1). City of Inmates is remarkable for the depth and breadth of the research that undergirds each of its narratives. Hernández, a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, reports that an “archival void blankets much of the history” of law enforcement in Los Angeles (p. 2). In its absence, she relies on news reports, organizational records, personal papers, and the “secret codes, handbills, scribbled manifestos, and songs” constituting what she describes as the “rebel archives” of those who resisted incarceration (p. 4). From these sources Hernández reconstructs the mechanisms and motivations of imprisonment in Los Angeles, from the early Spanish missions to the Obama administration.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Natsu Taylor Saito (2019) studied this question.