or do you have other genres that you're interested in? i'm big on poetry. i'm big on pros. so, let's say for instance, i would care to a speech the first thing i would do is to start to read a poem or something that strikes me, music, but mostly i love poetr that'snspirational to me. these books are inspirational in a different way. they inspire me to be the kind of people in these books to measure myself against successes of them and to know if i'm going in the right direction. sometimes you look at other people and say i'd like to have that treat and i like to be like that person and that's why i read this. i am a big historian, i love history. this just happens to be my summer historical kinds of books. >> book tv wants to know what you are reading. send us your summer reading list via twitter, instagram or posted

to our facebook page. book tv on c-span2, television for serious readers. >> we act like we haven't had a long history of violence and murders in this country. >> los angeles was founded by a racial fantasy that the idea of creating idyllic white, reproductive, exclusive communities on the land. it's a constant project of native elimination and of keeping racial outsiders out of this new medical community. native people were white, itinerant men who refuse to comply with the ideal. chinese immigrants, mexican migrants devised a series of new

laws such as criminalizing unlawful industry and this fantasy also fuels the rise of incarceration. >> surveillance, this incarcerates us. >> i'm a young, african-american male and i'm not out here do anything wrong. >> in los angeles which is the cultural capital of the united states mass incarceration is massive elimination. the city inmates is really the story of attempts at eliminati elimination. [speaking in native tongue] >> they had failed in their attempt because of the constant threat of rebellion that has lived in all communities who have been targeted for incarceration in los angeles. >> what you just saw was a promotional trailer for this book city of inmates: conquest, rebellion, and the rise of human

caging in los angeles, 1771-19 1771-1965. associate professor of ucla, kelly hernandez is the author. what was your goal with this book? >> that is a good question. los angeles is the largest or has the largest prison population in the world and my goal -- >> in the world? >> yes, largest population in the world. i wanted to look at how that came to be. >> and. >> it's a much deeper story than many of us assume. we do have the era of mass incarceration which was 1965 which is getting a lot of attention right now but the story runs deeper. it takes us back to the spanish colonial period, the mexican. and particular the early years of us conquest here in the american west. >> before we go back, let's go forward. how do you define largest prison population?

>> well, so, that is a statistic that i did not generate but it looks at the jail population in los angeles but what is interesting about la is we have the largest local jail population. in addition to that we have two federal prisons in the county and we have many other municipal jails and detention facilities including private detention facilities. >> 70000 people are imprisoned in the la area right now? >> within a local jail. we have more people within the municipal jails and federal facility. >> billion dollars is what taxpayers beyond the entrance been on this enterprise. how did it grow since 1965? >> since 1955 were talking about the war on drugs in particular and a certain level of quality

policing that here in los angeles right now the majority of people who are going to sometimes be in the jail tonight have been arrested on possession charges and dui charges but those are the leading cars charges of incarceration. >> going back in history and i think i read in your book there was a jailer hired before the municipal government was founded? >> that's correct. >> how did that happen? >> at the end of the mexican war and at the dawn of anglo-american role of us rule there was already a jail that was at full capacity operating here, it was a hangover from the mexico. and it becomes the first publicly owned stability here in los angeles and has its first public employee, the jailer that's working at the jail. as you have the transition from the mexican. to the us. it's actually the jail that is the first public institution here and the jailer is the first public employee.

>> is a baked into the dna of the la people to have this? >> we have a historically strong history of complies asian and incarceration but it takes off after 1850 and there's various trends that happened the time in the first trend is that the complies asian around the native people in particular their filling up the local jobs, largely on public drunkenness charges and there's so many people in so many indigenous people in the local jails of la that the jailer was called the indian jailer. >> you say is the criminal -- >> at the beginning of us rule there is a passage of several state laws, 1850 and as late as

1860 of the government protection of indians and in those laws you have the criminalization of landless miss and unemployment by native peoples in particular. if native peoples were found to not be employed and not have land, at the same time you have a genocidal campaign occurring against native people and that's explained in american genocide book. when native people were found without work or land they would be arrested, charged with vagrancy, incarcerated and usually the next monday morning sold off to the highest paying white bidder who would take them to their to a site of private employment. >> so, the influx of white people into la, was there cause-and-effect here when we talk about dealing? >> i argue in this but that the whole punchline of incarceration across the course of history is

that it really is a project of caging up, removing and expelling and purging targeted populations at certain moments in time. >> is a massive elimination. >> yes, that's what i call it. we talk about incarceration it's about elimination and the first people to be targeted were indigenous peoples and the point here being that for us conquest to adamant itself and take root in this land they had to remove the indigenous populations and squash all indigenous sovereignty claims. that was a part of the project of incarceration during the 1850s but as us conquest becomes secure by the 1880s the targets of incarceration changed. >> how so? >> the most surprising thing i found was in the archive that after anglo-americans sovereignty was secured here by 1880 the next targets of incarceration in los angeles are poor, white men. this is a fascinating story

about 19th century america and the rise of corporate capitalism and land privatization after the us civil war and you have hundreds of thousands of white men been dispossessed and have become the wandering poor and homeless. they begin to wander to the urban north and american west in the fantasy of anglo-american congress in the west was that you had white men who lead nuclear families of women and children and they would eventually buy homes, buy land, settle down and reproduce those families on the land. when you have these thousands of poor, white men who were itinerant, wonders, did not have women, do not have families and steady work they constituted their own kind of racial threat to this fantasy of the settler ideal in the american west. that's how they became the targets of incarceration. there was a project to cage them up, to remove them from the

streets, to limit the social and racial threat that they constituted to the settler fantasy here in america west. that's how they became the targets between 1880s and 19 tens. >> kelly hernandez with the -- did you see other trends when the movie studios moved in? >> certainly, you have the decline of white mail itinerant and it's important to point out that the turn of the 20th century, here in los angeles and across america west, white men constitute nearly 100% of the incarcerated population. it's surprising in terms of what we think about incarceration today. it's important to think historically about the trends -- did you have a question? what happens by the 1920s of incorporating the white men into the military, white-collar work, hollywood and they no longer constitute the same kind of threat to the settler community. this is a new moment when new

threats emerge. what becomes particularly important in the 1920s is mexican incarceration. during the 1920s mexican immigrants made about 1 million border crossings into the united states. employers across the southwest this was a wonderful thing. they wanted mexican workers to come and pick the crops in particular and to work on the railroads but there were still many racial nationalists in congress and the northeast and other places who said we have spent the last 40 years here in congress trying to create what effectively is a white only his immigration system with a cap on that with the passage of the 1924 immigration act which was to strict immigration from most places except northern and western europe but the businessmen in the southwest had forced a backdoor for mexican immigrants in the back door to the main open and so mexican immigrants were entering the

states without limitation throughout the 1920s. you have this tussle between employers and the southwest wanted large number of mexican immigrants into the united states but not as citizens but to work and go home and you had the racial nationalists in congress, the nativists in congress who said we don't want anyone who is not white entering this country. there was a real tussle that was happening between these two poles of american politics. what happened during the 1920s is fascinating because throughout this debate that was happening in congress about mexican immigration and be allowed to enter the country every year and under what terms, in 1929 it was a senator from the american south from south line in particular said let's stop worrying about how many mexicans are entering the country every year and let's start talking about in what way they enter the country. let's make sure they enter the country in a way that's monitored and that can be

controlled and that we can turn the switch on and off to allow more in when we need them and we can turn off the switch and stop them from entering when we don't need them as workers. so what the senator did in 1929 is he proposed a new crime and that crime was the crime of unlawful entry into the united states. in 1929 congress passed a new law, immigration act of march 4th to 29 which criminal law is unmonitored entry into the united states and the entire purpose of this law was to compel mexican immigrants to enter through ports of entry so that we could control the number of came in every year. >> rather than crossing borders. >> exactly as many people have been doing for generations. >> who was the senator? >> coleman livingston from south carolina. >> the fact that this stock market in the country was doing well at that point, did that

having to do with this? >> this new law that passed in march the stock market crashed in the later year in october and the way in which it's enforced, i would say, it has some impact that the need for mexican workers declined during the 1930s so employers were less resistant to mexican workers being picked up and imprisoned on these charges but throughout the 1930s you had tens of thousands of mexican immigrants who are arrested and prosecuted and imprisoned for unlawful entry. it was a brand-new crime created to imprison them in particular and the us peru of prisons established prisons across the border just to imprison them. one in tucson and one in los angeles.

>> why does your book and in 1965? >> the book and in 19651 because what i'm doing about the city of intimates is writing about the rise of mass incarceration and many people begin the date as a backlash against the uprising of 1965. i wanted to bring us up to that moment in particular. >> what caused this? >> we could be starting not for many more years. what caused watts was the frustration over unemployment and underemployment in african communities and the ways in which labor unions made it difficult for african-americans to get work and for employers who refuse to hire them. the crowded and unsanitary living conditions in south la and it was a historically segregated district and police violence. that was really the driving force behind watts in 1965. that in the two years leading up

to the outbreak in august of 1955 you had dozens of african-americans who been killed by the lapd, many of them shot in the back and unarmed and it was a resistance to the recent surge of killings but also the decades long struggle and frustration that the first recorded killing of an african-american male of the lapd happens in april of 1927. the community launched a massive protest campaign against the killing to bring the officers to justice. they don't find justice in the campaign and they continue to protest and resist throughout the 30s, 40s and 50s and it is refusal of local police to address the issues of please totality in los angeles that is the trigger for 196,517,000 people in la jails today.

do you know the california prison population up and? no, not offhand. >> california is thought of a liberal, progressive area. why such a large prison population? >> that's a good question, too. there's been quite a bit of research on the rise of incarceration in the state of california. much of that research brings us back to los angeles as a place where the policies that led to the rise of mass incarceration come from. the sentencing policy, the three strike laws, gang injunctions, all of that comes out of los angeles. another reason why telling the local story is so important. yes, it is about la but it's also about california which has one of the largest prison populations in the nation and it's also about the country. >> how so? what about the country -- as we go through a discussion right now on criminal justice.

>> again, it comes back to a lot of the policies and practices that the la and lapd have long been seen as progressive performers of policing as leaders and please practice and so the practices you see adopted across the country have been tested and tried first here in los angeles. that is true certainly going back to the 1920s. that's why looking at la is so important. there's another way and that the diversity of incarcerations here reflect what you see across the country. we have a local jail system, federal facilities which hold many people on immigration charges, and we have in the great detention centers. you don't have diversity like that in every county or city but you do have it here. >> what is the reputation of the local jails? >> who are you talking to -- [laughter] part of the community-based organizations are the rebel

archives, what i call them, the tell the incarceration for the last 100-200 years and those policing in general are seen as either occupying forces within segregated communities. the jails are seen as unhealthy spaces that are locking up members of our communities that may have problems and struggles but should not be seen as the problem, in and of themselves. in particular were talking about addiction issues. i think it depends on who you are speaking to in los angeles. the communities i work with seem to come together when i wrote this book incarceration and policing are seen as sites of struggle. there are other communities in los angeles that see our local police as really the site of safety. it's trying to engage in

conversation across communities and is one of the things that i hope this book can accomplish. one of the things the city of inmates does is that it brings a lot of different communities into the conversation about mass incarceration and gives us conceptual tools, conquest and colonialism, to talk together about the issues of policing and incarceration. >> the militarization of police forces, did that begin here in la as well? >> there is a lot of research on the first swat team being developed here but the analytics that i am putting forward in this book is that when we think about the depth of incarceration, the story of incarceration, really going back to and revolving around the evolution of colonialism in the american west and that colonialism hasn't stopped and hasn't ended. i would argue that the militarization of policing began at the moment of conquest and

remained with us all the way through -- this is nothing new. >> kelly hernandez, assistant professor of history at ucla and the other of this book, city of inmates: conquest, rebellion, and the rise of human caging in los angeles, 1771-1965. thank you for being a book to be. >> thank you. >> book tv is on twitter and facebook. we want to hear from you. tweet us, or post a comment on our facebook page. >> hello all. thank you for your patience. welcome to la's. we are thankful to welcome jeffrey west. jeffrey is a theoretical therapist was been a senior fellow at the national laboratory and a distinguished professor at santa fe institute where he served also as