But, in characteristic fashion, he goes beyond this, asking readers to think in new ways about disturbing phenomena that they may take for granted. Bringing together Moynihan’s concerns about black family structure with the cold fact of mass incarceration produces a striking conclusion: Mass incarceration actually causes crime. In its long-term impact on the black family, mass incarceration has many of the disintegrative effects that Moynihan attributed to slavery. It certainly has a similar multigenerational impact; the children of imprisoned people have a much higher chance of themselves being incarcerated as adults.

Incarceration, as Coates notes, is a central element in the “tangle of perils”—as opposed to Moynihan’s “tangle of pathology”—of growing up black and poor in America. Moynihan argued in 1965 that in the face of history and structural racism, “the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated” in many urban black neighborhoods. A half-century later, mass incarceration perpetuates this phenomenon more than any other factor. Still, I doubt that reparative “affirmative action for neighborhoods,” advocated by Robert Sampson, will be adopted any time soon. I can hear the objection now: That would be “rewarding crime.”

The terrible failures of America’s criminal-justice system can actually, from a certain perspective, be seen as policy successes. The high rate of recidivism suggests that prisons fail to rehabilitate those who are locked up. Yet if two-thirds of parolees return to prison, perhaps it is because the economy offers them no jobs and the welfare state excludes them as ex-felons. Their return to the social services provided by incarceration, from this angle, makes a degree of sense. And the point of Coates’s essay is that these people the economy has no room for and the state is unwilling to care for are, as they have always been, disproportionately of African descent.

There is no way to dispute this: In the post-civil-rights era, racial policy drives mass incarceration. Indeed, mass incarceration is racial policy. As Coates shows, the association of blacks and criminality in the white mind is so deeply rooted in American history as to be virtually unassailable. Moynihan himself observed that in 1960, 37 percent of the prison population was black.

Still, this continuity does leave open important questions—why did the incarceration rate, which remained steady for a century after the end of slavery, spike after 1970? Why did the black incarceration rate, which had always exceeded that of whites, increase so much more rapidly in the same era?

One view is that cries for “law and order” in the late 1960s brought together southern Democrats and conservative Republicans under the umbrella of the “southern strategy.” Unable any longer to object openly to housing and school integration, civil rights, or black political power, politicians decried instead the threat of “crime” and “welfare” as shorthand for white racial resentment.