Before coming to mass incarceration, I’d read his Johnson-era report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” and a lot about the subsequent reaction. In reading more about Moynihan, both as a liberal wonk and his turn under Nixon, I thought I sensed many of the biases and preconceptions that made mass incarceration seem a plausible answer to the social problems that beset black communities. It was not, to my mind, so simple as racist conservatives; it was self-professed liberals too who embraced solutions for black people that I was convinced they would not embrace for white ones.
