Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

City of Inmates explores Los Angeles' long history of incarceration from the colonial period to the Black Power era. Combing through rich archival materials, including Mexican newspapers, court and criminal records, and organizational papers, Hernandez argues that Los Angeles' penal system was a complex and well-oiled machine, intending to eliminate indigenous communities, jobless whites, Chinese immigrants, Mexicanos, and African Americans. She rightfully contends that human caging was white settlers' answer to removing and denying certain populations from land and socioeconomic and political autonomy. Hernandez tells Los Angeles' less familiar story of imprisonment, explaining in fascinating detail how the city became the carceral capital of the world.

Hernandez sheds new light on how a racially and ethnically diverse population was impacted by Anglo-Americans' socioeconomic and political dreams of conquest in Los Angeles. Los Angeles' history of human caging begins in the Los Angeles Basin formerly known as the Tongva Basin with the Spanish Crown in 1781 and expanded after the conflict between the United States and Mexico. Building the region's first jail, Spanish authorities embarked on campaigns designed to challenge indigenous communities' sovereignty. Indigenous people were arrested for drunkenness, vagrancy, and for being public charges. Punishment often included flogging, hobbling, and being sold to the highest white bidder.

By the early twentieth century, Los Angeles operated the largest jail system in the country, criminalizing and punishing itinerant white male hobos and tramps. Arriving in Los Angeles between the 1880s and 1910s, jobless white men, in hopes of securing decent-paying employment, violated enterprising whites' ideas about nuclear households and productive settlement and labor. White settlers viewed [End Page 561] unemployed men as a menacing population that failed to thrive in the industrial age, and arrested them for violating California's 1872 Anti-Vagrancy Act. An emerging racially diverse Los Angeles also complicated white settlers' ideas and fantasies about conquest and settlement. During the early-to-mid-twentieth century, the city experienced an influx of Mexican and Chinese immigrants and southern blacks. White fears about an ethnically diverse city and interracial coalitions and unions culminated into legal statutes that restricted and halted Chinese and Mexican immigration, the construction of new prison facilities throughout the nation, and the jailing of Chinese immigrants, Mexican political activists and border-crossers, and African Americans fighting against racial injustice and police brutality.

Kelly Hernandez offers a sweeping narrative of Los Angeles's history. City of Inmates joins an impressive group of scholars, including Dan Berger, Heather Thompson, and Ethan Blue, whose scholarship focuses on the historical, socioeconomic, and political roots of the carceral state, the varying contours of legal confinement, and the different ways in mass incarceration impacted racial and ethnic minority communities. At the same time, City of Inmates is a major intervention to carceral studies. Hernandez convincingly situates Los Angeles within national histories and conversations on mass incarceration, asserting that Los Angeles was important to the making of the nation's carceral state. Her positioning of Los Angeles at the epicenter of global histories on human caging deepens scholars' views on crime and punishment and immigration. Coupled with Los Angeles' history of mass incarceration and elimination is also the unknown story of "rebel activists" that contested white settlers' efforts at imprisoning Native Americans, Mexicans, African Americans, and landless whites. Hernandez tells a remarkable story that should be required reading for scholars and graduate and undergraduates students. [End Page 562]