Rockefeller Archive Center

Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports are created by recipients of research travel stipends and by many others who have conducted research at the RAC. The reports demonstrate the breadth of the RAC's archival holdings, particularly in the study of philanthropy and its effects. Read more about the history of philanthropy at resource.rockarch.org. Also, see the RAC Bibliography of Scholarship, a comprehensive online database of publications citing RAC archival collections.

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From Nelson Rockefeller to Eric Adams: The Evolving Politics of Crime and Punishment in New York

February 16, 2023

Despite calls for the "defunding" of the police and the reimagining of policing following the death of George Floyd in 2020, many New York politicians, in response to rising rates of violent crime, have begun to embrace "law and order." All of this bears a great similarity to the politics of crime and punishment during the governorship of Nelson Rockefeller. Examining several documents in the gubernatorial records of Nelson Rockefeller at the Rockefeller Archive Center, newspaper articles, and public opinion, this report documents the political response to violence and drug addiction in the 1960s and 1970s and compares it to the present, reviewing contrasting arguments of influential Black leaders and "white liberals." It concludes that the present crime context, much like the one during the Rockefeller-era, has divided the left and Black leadership while solidifying Republican commitment to "law and order." It argues that the history of the Rockefeller drug laws illustrates that these divisions and the legitimate fears of working- and middle-class minorities can produce haphazard policies that harm rather than save these communities.

African American Studies; Crime and Criminal Justice; Latino Studies; Nelson A. Rockefeller Gubernatorial Records

The White Slavery Controversy, Women’s Bodies, and the Making of Public Space in the United States

February 26, 2019

After John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was appointed to serve on the New York White Slavery Grand Jury, he began a long commitment to the cause of prostitution and sex trafficking. This research report outlines initial conclusions based on a review of records in the Rockefeller Archive Center for the ten years after Rockefeller's service on the grand jury. The research report summarizes findings from the archives, previews arguments deriving from the archival documents, and suggests additional future directions for research.

Bureau of Social Hygiene; Crime and Criminal Justice; Office of the Messrs. Rockefeller RG 2; Rockefeller Family; Social Welfare; Women

The Making of the "Carceral State": Race, Punitive Politics, and the Changing Logic of Incarceration, New York, 1956-1986

January 1, 2010

In 1970 there were slightly less than 200,000 people incarcerated in the United States. By 2007, more than 2.2 million people were incarcerated, and the total number of Americans under criminal justice supervision, including juveniles, people in jail or on parole or probation, exceeded seven-million, or one in a hundred American adults. This dramatic surge in American reliance on incarceration was not inevitable or even predictable. In fact, the origins of mass incarceration were rooted in a period of great doubt about the very utility of prisons that emerged in the mid- twentieth century. How, then, did Americans move toward a total reinvestment in an institution that many experts had declared a failure; and how did they come to accept and indeed embrace the punitive, retributive, hard-line penal philosophy that bolstered mass incarceration?

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