about half of davis stockman's book called "trumped" so i've got several things i'm either reading or just finished reading. >> book tv wants to know what your reading. send us your reading list via twitted, or facebook. booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers. >> we haven't had a long history of police brutality and violence and pleasured in the country. >> los angeles was founded by a racial fantasy, the idea of creating -- exclusive community on native lands. >> colonialism. >> constant projects of native elimination and of keeping

outsiders out of this mythical community. native people, poor, white itinerant many, chinese immigrants, a series of new laws such as criminalizing illegal spray. this fantasy -- >> surveillance, ... .... >> 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. kelly hernandez is the author. what is your goal with this book? >> that is a good question. los angeles is the largest prison population in the world. why goal was to excavate why that came to be. >> and? >> it is a much deeper story than any of us assume. we have the area of mass imprisonment but this story runs

deeper back to the spanish colonial and mexican period and early years of u.s. conquest in the american west. >> let's go forward. how do you define largest prison population? >> so, that is a statistic that i did not generate but it looks at the jail population in los angeles. what is interesting is los angeles has the largest local jail population and two federal prisons and many other municipal jails and detention facilities including a private detention. >> 17,000 people are in prison in the los angeles area? >> within the local county jail. more in the municipal and federal facilities. >> billion dollars is what taxpayers spend on this enterpri enterprise. how did it grow to be so big

since 1965? >> we are talking about the war on drugs in particular. and a certain level of quality of life policing. the majority of people in jail has been arrested on dui and drug charges. those are the leading charges of incarceration. >> going back in history, i think i read in book, there was a jailer hired before the municipal government was founded? >> that is correct. >> how did that happen? >> in the period between the end of mexican rule here in los angeles, at the end of the u.s.-mexican war, and the dawn of anglo american u.s. rule, there was already a jail that was formed.

you have the transition from the u.s. to mexican period it is the jail that was the first public institution. >> is it baked into the dna of the los angeles people to have a strong judicial system, i guess? i don't know how to describe it. >> we certainly have a historically long history of criminalization and incarceration predating the u.s. period. but it takes off after 1850 and there is various trends that happen through time and the first trend of incarceration in los angeles is the criminalization and incarceration of native people in particular. they are the ones filling up the local jails largely on public drunk charges. the indigenous people in the jails of los angeles the jailer was called the indian jailer.

>> you say it is the criminalization of indigenous people. how so. in those laws and they are not employed and not having land. it is explained well. when native people are found without hips, they are charged and incarcerated and then usually the next monday morning they would offer it up to the highest paying bidder.

>> so the influx of white people into los angeles was there cause and effect here? >> i argue the whole punch line of incarceration in los angeles is that it really is a project of caging up, removing, and expelling targeted populations at certain amounts of time. >> you say mass elimination? >> i call it mass elimination. it is the process of elimination. the first people we targeted were indigenous peoples. the point being for u.s. conquest to really sediment itself and take root in this land they had to remove the ind ind indigenous population. that was part of the project. as u.s. conquest becomes secure by 1980 the target changes. >> how so?

>> after anglo american sovereignty is secure by 1880, the next targets of incarceration here in los angeles are poor white men. this is fascinating story about 19th century america and the rise of capital america and you have hundreds of thousands of white men who are displaced and are the wondering poor and wonder the urban north and american west. the fantasy of anglo american conquest in the west was you had white men who led nuclear families of women and children and would by homes and land and settle down. when you have thousands of poor white men who are wandering and didn't have families or steady work, they constitute their own

kind of racial threat to the fantasy of the settler ideal in the u.s. that is how they became the target of incarceration. there was a project to cage them up, remove them from the streets, and to limit the threat. >> kelly hernandez, with the growth of los angeles in the 20th century, did you see other trends? when the movie studios moved in maybe other different commerces? >> certainlyly you have a decline. it is important to point out here in los angeles and across the northwest, white men constitute nearly a hundred percent of the incarcerated population. it is surprising. but it is important to think historically about the trends. did you have a question? >> no. you go. >> so what happens though, by

the 1920s is you have the incorporation of white men in the military, into white collar work, holiday, and they no longer constitute the same threat. this is a new moment where new threats emerge. in the northeast, there was conflict and we spent the last 40, and they passed the immigration act and that brought

people from other than northern and western europe. but there was a backdoor. is we have the naturalists and natives in congress who were saying we don't want anyone who is not white entering this country. there was a real tussle happening between the two poles of american politics. what happened during the 1920s throughout the debate that is happening in congress about mexican immigration and how many are allowed to enter the country and under what terms and he said

let's stop the war. let's start talking about in what way they entered the country and make sure they enter in a way that is monitored and k can be controlled. we can turn off the switch and don't need them as workers. this criminalized entry into the united states and the entire purpose of the law to enter through parts of the area. >> rather than just crossing the border. >> rather than cross the border for generations.

>> who was that senator? >> his name was coleman livingston from south carolina. >> the fact thastock market -- the fact the stock market was doing well. did that have anything to do with it? >> it crashed later that year in october. the way in which it is enforced i would say some some impact and the need for mexican employers declined. throughout the 1930s, you had tens of thousands of mexican immigrants who are arrested and prosecuted and put in prison and establish three new prisons just

to incarcerate them. one is established outside of el paso, another in tucson, arizona and a third here in los angeles at terminal island. why does your book end in 1965? >> that is a good question. i was writing a prehistory of the rise of mass incarceration and many people date the beginning of mas incarceration as a backlash against the rise of 1965 so i wanted to bring us up to that moment in particular. >> what caused riots? >> that we could be studying for many more years. what caused it was frustrisions over employment and underemployment in the african-american communities, refusing to hire african-americans, the crowded and unsanitary living conditions

in south los angeles. it was a historically segregated district. and police violence. that was really the driving force behind the 1965 riots. in the two years leading up to the outbreak and august of 1965 you had dozens of african-americans who had been killed by the lap pd many shot in the back and unarmed. it was a resistance to the recent surge of killing but also the decades long struggle. the first killing of a black male by the lapd happened april 27th. a campaign is launched against the killing to bring the officers to justice. they don't find justice and continue to protest and resist throughout the '40s, '50s, and

it is are refusal of local elite to address the issues of police brutality that is the trigger for 1965. >> 17,000 people in los angeles jails today. why such a large prison population? >> there has been research on the rise of being in prison. los angeles is the place where a lot of policies and another reason why telling this local story is important is yes, it is about los angeles but it is

about california that has one of the largest prison populations in the nation but also about the country. >> how so about the country? as we go through a discussion on criminal justice reform? >> again it comes back to a lot of these policies and practices that los angeles and lapd have been seen as progressive reformers against the practice. we have again, a localal -- a

local fight. i do work with community-based organizations and they represent what i call the rebel archive that held and told the story of incarceration in los angeles for the last 200 years. among many of the groups, the jails and 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. i think it depends on who you have speaking with, the communities i have been working with, thinking together and

writing this book, incarceration and policing are sites of struggle. there are or communities that see the local police as the sight of safety. it is really trying to engage in a conversation across communities and one of the things hope this book can accomplish. city of inmates bring as lot of communities into the conversation about mass incarceration and gives us a cool, conquest and colonialism, to talk about the issue of policing and incarceration. >> the militarization of police forces. did that begin in los angeles as bell? wasn't the s.w.a.t. team developed here? >> there was a lot of research on the first s.w.a.t. team being developed here. but the analytic i am putting forward is if we think about the depth of incarceration, the story of incarceration really going back to and revolving

around the evolution of colonialism in the u.s. and that hasn't stopped and 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 is the author of city inmates; conquest, rebellion and the rise of human caging in los angeles. 1771-1965. thank you for being on booktv.