Review
Offers a radically new perspective . . . . City of Inmates demonstrates incontrovertibly that the systems of immigrant exclusion and mass incarceration emerged together and fed each other.--The Metropole
By widening the historical frame, [Hernandez] offers the reader a deeper, more complex, and more historically nuanced view of incarceration. An essential contribution to critical prison studies (CPS).--H-Net Reviews
Details how successive authoritarian powers in present-day Los Angeles have targeted and captured people using cages to create what is now one of the world's largest prison societies, and ends with a call for it to be destroyed.--The New Inquiry
A beautifully narrated, deeply insightful historical assessment of the dynamics of American settler colonialism. . . . Remarkable for the depth and breadth of the research that undergirds each of its narratives.--Journal of American History
City of Inmates is a story of removal and dispossession. It is a story of environmental transformation with the use of a subjugated work force (chain gangs). And it is the story of the rise of the human cage--an object that has been both a tool of removal from the land and a racialized environment itself.--Environmental History
An astoundingly original evaluation of the central place of incarceration in the history of Los Angeles. . . . City of Inmates is a book that should be read by every person seriously concerned with the question of how we got to where we are, and where we might go from here.--Pacific Historical Review
Marshaling more than two centuries of historical data, Hernandez finds that native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of mass incarceration in Los Angeles from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion.--Law & Social Inquiry
Convincingly demonstrates that the history of American prisons indexes major social and political battles of the country's history.--Western Historical Quarterly
An incisive and meticulously researched study of the transformation of Los Angeles from a small group of Native American communities in the 18th century into an Aryan city of the sun in the 20th.--Los Angeles Review of Books
Hernandez puts in perspective the arrests, convictions, and incarceration for one city that contributes to the US being the carceral capital of the world. Recommended.--Choice
Review
City of Inmates is a pathbreaking work that not only considers together the histories of the regimes of domestic incarceration and immigration detention, the major mechanisms that plague the condition of African Americans and Latino/as in our time. It also incorporates histories of incarceration and removal of Native Americans, Chinese, and poor whites as modes of 'elimination' by white settler colonialism. City of Inmates is a bold work that will surprise and provoke.--Mae Ngai, author of Impossible Subjects
In this compelling and comprehensive history of incarceration in Los Angeles, Hernandez demonstrates how authorities—whether Spanish, Mexican, or American—have long used imprisonment as a tool to control labor and immigration. Covering nearly two centuries of incarceration, Hernandez masterfully synthesizes the history of immigration and deportation, the history of crime and punishment, and the history of settler colonialism.--Margaret Jacobs, author of White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940
Using settler colonialism as an analytical touchstone, City of Inmates extends arguments about mass incarceration's antiblack violence while challenging its commonly asserted origins in the Deep South or the northeastern United States. Excavating the deep histories of punishment in Los Angeles, Hernandez significantly broadens our understanding of mass incarceration's intersections with immigrant detention and colonial dispossession. Vast in scope and intimate in detail, this book is timely and necessary.--Ethan Blue, author of Doing Time in the Depression
Kelly Lytle Hernandez's City of Inmates is a remarkable book. No historian has ever told California's history with the breadth and depth of its enduring significance quite like this. Since the Spanish colonial period every kind of American--from Native Americans to Mexican and Chinese Americans, to landless whites and African Americans--has passed through California's jailhouse doors with profound implications for the shape of our nation today. No telling or teaching of the past is complete without reckoning with these supremely urgent stories of our carceral history.--Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness
About the Author
Kelly Lytle Hernandez is professor of history and African American studies at UCLA. She is also interim director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. One of the nation's leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is author of the award-winning book Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010) and City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Currently, Professor Lytle Hernandez is the research lead for the Million Dollar Hoods project, which maps how much is spent on incarceration per neighborhood in Los Angeles County.
