What Are the Costs of Mass Incarceration in Los Angeles?

Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández did not anticipate suing the Los Angeles Police Department. When she began her second book, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771 –1965, she thought she would be writing about the well-documented historical connection between enslavement and mass incarceration. She thought her research would affirm that the use of incarceration in LA, like in many other cities in the US, stemmed from an economic reliance on captive labor.

Instead, the data showed Lytle Hernández something unexpected. In LA, she found, “mass incarceration equals mass elimination. It was more about targeting communities for purging and banishment.” Lytle Hernández says the realization shook her to her core.

So, the scholar took a sabbatical from her work. Enmeshed in local communities impacted by incarceration, police violence, and surveillance, Lytle Hernández listened as community advocates identified a major need for data that was both accessible and available. “They said, ‘We know who’s being arrested, we know the charges, but when we go to the LAPD or the sheriff’s department, they won’t give us [information].’”

The results of these conversations were twofold. First, Lytle Hernández collaborated with members of the LA No More Jails coalition to launch Million Dollar Hoods. The UCLA-based and community-driven project documents the human and fiscal costs of incarceration in LA, namely the city’s disproportionate investment in locking up primarily Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and working-class communities since the 1970s. The work of the research team has taken many forms, including an interactive map that details how much the city of Los Angeles spends incarcerating people who live in select neighborhoods; on Westside South Central, one such “million dollar hood,” the city of Los Angeles has spent over $38 million between 2012 and 2017.

The project has also generated collaborative, rapid-response reports for community use, many of which have advanced campaigns to reduce the number of people inside prisons and jails, including youth detention facilities. Policing Our Students, a report on over-policing in schools, finds that from 2014 to 2017, one out of every four students arrested by the LA School Police was a child in elementary or middle school. The report eventually played an integral part in the campaign to divert funds from school policing to a Black Student Achievement Plan with young people, including the Police-Free LAUSD Coalition, organizing for police-free schools.

What also emerged from Lytle Hernández’s work with Million Dollar Hoods was a public records lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Southern California to gain access to more information about policing and incarceration in Los Angeles. As part of the 2019 settlement, Lytle Hernández, and consequently Million Dollar Hoods, the LAPD agreed to release nearly 200 boxes of the LAPD’s historical records. Spanning the 1970s through the 2000s—and originally slated for destruction—the documents cover everything from task force records that illuminate the LAPD-targeted Asian immigrants for arrest to the disproportionate killing of Black community members by LAPD officers. These records, “liberated from the LAPD” according to Professor Mark Vestal of the Million Dollar Hoods team, are the foundation of another project by Million Dollar Hoods and the UCLA ethnic studies research centers: Archiving the Age of Mass Incarceration (AAMI).

What distinguishes AAMI is that, unlike many scholarly pursuits directed by a set of purely academic research questions, the project is rooted in the community’s demands. People from the communities most impacted by incarceration in LA are the ones asking questions of the archive. This provides an opportunity to share the undertold experiences of policing, jail, surveillance, and more, that are widely known to community members and revealed in the LAPD’s own records.

According to its collaborators, it’s an opportunity to shift power. “We are steadily subjected to the dominant narratives of the people doing the incarcerating, who construct prisons, who create carceral morality,” says Dr. Tabatha Jones Jolivet, one of AAMI’s community advisors. “This project is a tool for the community to build narrative power by amplifying the peoples’ counterstories through a peoples’ archive. It’s about building people power.”

Although it is a digital archive, AAMI is also convening people in real life, including through forums facilitated by leaders like Trudy Goodwin (“Mama Tru”), an advisor and member of the Black Panther Party, who has been doing this work since the ’60s, following her mother’s involvement in the civil rights movement. These forums have introduced archive themes to organizations like the LA Black Worker Center and the Youth Justice Coalition to, according to Mama Tru, “see how we can inform the work they’re doing and ask, ‘How does this match up with what you’ve experienced?’” In this sense, the Million Dollar Hoods team is using data for yet another social justice mission: community-driven research. Guided by activists like Mama Tru, AAMI is a community archive that can affect change—not perform it.

AAMI also prioritizes making the records legible because, ultimately, the people behind the project want the community to know how to use these records. Upon entering the archive, which is designed by Mariah Tso, users can view exhibits and curated collections: highlighting entities like the Black Panther Party. “Those who commit the murders write the reports,” an exhibit quoting journalist Ida B. Wells, names the LAPD officers who have killed community members, dating back to 1976. “The Costs of Policing,” another collection, tracks institutions, agencies, and individuals who have profited from the LAPD’s participation in surveillance or asset forfeiture. The hope is that, by navigating these collections, online visitors to AAMI can learn the language of the archive in real time. “Using the LAPD’s own records, we’re demystifying the everyday machinery behind the LAPD as a death-dealing bureaucracy and exposing what LAPD attempts to conceal from our communities,” Jolivet says.

Like Million Dollar Hoods’ many offerings, AAMI is envisioned to be a community tool that can support anything from policy changes to civil liability cases. “We’re providing data and research to give movements more ammunition,” says Dr. David C. Turner III, a UCLA faculty lead on the project, who initially came to this work as a community organizer partnering with Million Dollar Hoods on a 2019 traffic enforcement report. Alongside community advisors, Turner is also supporting an oral history component to ensure first-person accounts of people leading the movement to dismantle mass incarceration are preserved. “While we have been working to document the horror of the carceral state and what communities have had to endure in the wake of it,” he shares, “it's also important for us to document and acknowledge how communities have fought back.”

This insistence on reclamation and resistance is a consistent ethos in AAMI’s work. Because, in Jolivet’s words, “harm is not going to have the last word.”