In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the city of Seattle received federal Department of Housing and Urban Development “Model cities” funds to address issues of racial disenfranchisement in the city. Premised under the “Great Society” ethos, Model cities sought to remedy the strained relationship between local governments and disenfranchised urban communities. Though police-community relations were not initially slated as an area of concern in the city's grant application, residents of the designated “model neighborhood” pressed for the formation of a law and justice task force to address the issue. This article examines the process and outcome of the two law-and-justice projects proposed by residents of the designated “model neighborhood”: the Consumer Protection program and the Community Service Officer project. Drawing on the work of legal geographies scholars, I argue that the failure of each of these efforts to achieve residents' intentions stems from the geographical imagination of urban problems. Like law-and-order projects today, the geographical imagination of the model neighborhood produced a discourse of exceptionality that subjected residents to extraordinary state interventions. The Model cities project thus provides an example of a “history of the present” of mass incarceration in which the geographical imagination of crime helps facilitate the re-creation of a racialized power structure.

The promise of civil rights is the promise of inclusion; yet the vast disparity in incarceration rates between blacks, Latinos, and whites stands as an ugly reminder of the nation's long history of race-based exclusionary practices. In this article, I argue that an important aspect of understanding race and the law in the twenty-first century is an appreciation of the American federal system that structures legal authority, political mobilization, and policy solutions and serves as an important and overlooked obstacle to more complete and sustained racial equality in crime and punishment in the United States. In contrast to the conventional wisdom about the role of the national government in protecting the rights of minorities and other disadvantaged groups, I suggest that crime and justice are arenas where the nationalization of issues has left the most important constituents behind. In fact, local crime politics provides a space where there is regular and ongoing articulation of the inclusionary goals of the civil rights agenda and sustained efforts to move forward in realizing that agenda through meaningful community involvement in promoting public safety, economic development, and social justice. This article explores these themes and offers a discussion of the linkages between federalism, racial inequality and crime, victimization and punishment.

This article examines how the conservative legal movement's successful countermobilization of the politics of rights enables U.S. Supreme Court outcomes that exacerbate racial and ethnic inequities while solidifying the privileged position of others in the name of equality. A comparison of two pivotal Supreme Court cases involving native entitlements—Morton v. Mancari (1974) and Rice v. Cayetano (2000)—illustrates how appeals to formal, as opposed to substantive, equality work in effect to support existing hierarchies. At the same time, the conservative legal movement's success provides progressive social actors with opportunities to reframe the discourse. We suggest that a critical questioning of strategies predicated on appeals for equal rights may be necessary to advance the interests of native populations in the current environment, and we identify an alternative way of working for native interests, one that escapes the constraints of equality doctrine by appealing to broader claims of social justice.