Los 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. Marshaling more than two
centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández unmasks how
histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black
disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this
telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of
the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernández documents the persistent
historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its
settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of
incarceration.
But
City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and
rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have
always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court
rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the
summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts
those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the
course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book
recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of
rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the
nation’s carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.