Hinton challenges the belief that America's prison problem originated with the Reagan administration's War on Drugs by tracing the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society at the height of the civil rights era.

Introduction:Origins of mass incarceration -- The war on black poverty -- Law and order in the great society -- The preemptive strike -- The war on black crime -- The battlegrounds of the crime war -- Juvenile injustice -- Urban removal -- Crime control as urban policy -- From the war on crime to the war on drugs -- Epilogue: Reckoning with the war on crime.