[from the publisher] What if racialized mass incarceration is not a perversion of our
criminal justice system’s liberal ideals, but rather a natural
conclusion? Adam Malka raises this disturbing possibility through a
gripping look at the origins of modern policing in the influential hub
of Baltimore during and after slavery’s final decades. He argues that
America’s new professional police forces and prisons were developed to
expand, not curb, the reach of white vigilantes, and are best understood
as a uniformed wing of the gangs that controlled free black people by
branding them—and treating them—as criminals. The post–Civil War triumph
of liberal ideals thus also marked a triumph of an institutionalized
belief in black criminality.
Mass incarceration may be a recent
phenomenon, but the problems that undergird the “new Jim Crow” are
very, very old. As Malka makes clear, a real reckoning with this
national calamity requires not easy reforms but a deeper, more radical
effort to overcome the racial legacies encoded into the very DNA of our
police institutions.