City of Inmates - BookWyrm

Paperback, 312 pages

Published Feb. 1, 2020 by The University of North Carolina Press.

ISBN:: 978-1-4696-5919-0

(1 review)

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 …

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.

2 editions

Scott reviewed City of Inmates by Kelly Lytle Hernandez

Review of 'City of Inmates' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

An excellent, accessible comparative study examining the history of incarceration in Los Angeles, tracing its practice through a chronological series of stories beginning with colonization in the late 18th century to the Watts Rebellion in 1965. In doing so, Lytle Hernández demonstrates the leading role that Los Angeles played in the emergence of the phenomenon of mass incarceration in the United States, but more centrally to argue that incarceration is a key component of settler colonialism in what became Los Angeles. Incarceration is one tool in the service of the “eliminatory logic” of settler colonialism, leading Lytle Hernández to define incarceration as “elimination.” Throughout the book, it can be seen how the law, its targeted enforcement, and resultant incarceration were used by Anglo-American settlers to preserve their racist fantasy of an “Aryan City of the Sun.”