I just finished an Honors Reading Group on Julilly Kohler-Hausmann’s Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America.  Kohler-Hausmann’s book is an excellent policy history that focuses on three case studies: the Rockefeller drug laws in New York, Ronald Reagan’s reforms to welfare in California in the early 1970s, and the transition from indeterminate to fixed prison terms in California in the mid-to-late 1970s. Like many of the best policy histories, Getting Tough’s material largely lies at the intersection of social history and political history.  But intellectual history is also an important part of Kohler-Hausmann’s narrative, which is, among other Read more