Will I love City of Inmates?

Award-winning historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez tells the story of how Los Angeles became home to the nation's largest jail by taking us back to the founding of Los Angeles and the western settlement of California.

She explains that European and Anglo-American settlers looked to eliminate unwanted populations in the region by using war, raids, genocide, and incarceration to clear and restrict the presence of Native, Hispanic, and racial outsiders from western landscapes.

City of Inmates dispels any simple ideas about jails in America being rooted in reform—punishment and death have always been a part of law enforcement.

This book has hugely influenced my thinking on US racism, imprisonment, and immigration, especially my second book. By studying a long history of incarceration in Los Angeles, Lytle Hernandez demonstrates how “mass incarceration is mass elimination.” This argument was a revelation that opened new ways for me to see the connections among different people swept away into cages. Like Dunbar-Ortiz, she reveals how settler colonialism connects working-class white, Black, Indigenous, Chinese, and Mexican people targeted for arrest, imprisonment, and removal. Crucially, she reads “rebel archives” of those people who resisted their subjugation and fought for justice, showing how they never… show more.