" The Suburban Crisis offers an original and deeply researched account of the war on drugs that centers white suburban drug users, Black and Latino dealers, and fearmongering racial tropes about drug trafficking. It is an extraordinary work of scholarship full of insights about the racial politics of, and bipartisan support for, the machinery of mass incarceration." --Tomiko Brown-Nagin, author of Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality "Lassiter shows how the racial disparities within the criminal legal system are not an unforeseen accident but instead are, by design, created through bipartisan consensus to protect middle-class white victimhood. More than just a book about the war on drugs, The Suburban Crisis is a field-defining revelation that changes the way we understand postwar urban history and the contours of inequality in America." --Elizabeth Hinton, author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime " The Suburban Crisis is a masterpiece--political history at its best. Drawing on a remarkable amount of rigorous and exhaustive archival research, it is a forceful, nuanced, and gripping chronicle of the nation's tragic campaign to control drug use since the 1950s." --Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, author of Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America " The Suburban Crisis is a myth-shattering masterpiece. By tearing down artificial dividing lines that have long shaped the conventional narrative--Republican versus Democrat, urban versus suburban, rehabilitation versus incarceration--Matthew Lassiter shows us the full picture of the war on drugs for the first time.

This brilliant book is an absolute must-read." --Kevin M. Kruse, Princeton University "Matthew Lassiter's The Suburban Crisis is a riveting, counterintuitive analysis of the impact of the war on drugs on the course of US history in the second half of the twentieth century. Deeply researched and powerfully written, the book upends easy partisan analysis of the growth of the prison state." --Kim Phillips-Fein, Columbia University.