Kelly Lytle Hernandez’s Book Selected by the National Book Foundation

Kelly Lytle Hernandez’s City of Inmates has been selected by the National Book Foundation as one of the essential books to rethink and dismantle mass incarceration. Eddie Glaude, Jr. describes the book and why it was selected: “City of Inmates insists that we understand mass incarceration against the backdrop of two centuries of violence (against indigenous people, Mexican and Chinese immigrants, poor white migrants, and Black people) on these shores. ‘Mass incarceration,’ the first sentence of the book declares, ‘is mass elimination.’ This beautifully written history forces readers to pan out and see how the broader logic of settler colonialism has led a city like Los Angeles to lock up more people than any other city in the world.”