There’s been a lot of loose talk about the 1994 Crime Bill recently, especially in the Democratic primary. As the recriminations go back and forth, it’s important to remember that the Crime Bill was a massive piece of legislation that included a ban on assault weapons, the Violence Against Women Act, provisions for 100,000 new police officers, truth-in-sentencing reforms, a bunch of new death penalty offenses (none of which have ever been used), and a big outlay of money for prison building.

If you’re looking back now, twenty-two years later, and trying to praise or criticize politicians for how they voted on the bill, you should remember that it was a mixed bag. Bernie Sanders didn’t have the option of voting for the Violence Against Women Act and against truth-in-sentencing and prison building.

Mark Kleiman also reminds us that it’s key to remember the context of the times. In 1994, the crime rate had been soaring for a long time and had reached an historic high. Crime was one of the most pressing issues of the day. It turned out, though, that 1994 was the high water mark for crime. It began falling immediately after the Crime Bill passed. The murder rate, for example, is now half of what it was back then.

I don’t necessarily agree with every point that Kleiman makes, but he’s done an outstanding job of putting the debate over the Crime Bill in context.

It’s not entirely clear why crime has fallen so much or if the 1994 bill had much to do it. We do know that there were some nasty compromises in the bill, all of which seem to have come at the insistence of Republicans. Their demand that we essentially triple the time people do in jail (through truth-in-sentencing), and their promotion of the prison building industry, combined to exacerbate an already growing mass incarceration problem. As a result, even as crime plummeted, the inmate population soared.

Anyone who foresaw this and voted against the bill could be forgiven even if that meant that they could be portrayed as supporting violence against women, the sale of military-style semiautomatic weapons, and being indifferent to the violent crime then roiling our inner city communities.

In other words, it’s complicated.

Hillary Clinton didn’t have a vote, of course, since she was serving as First Lady at the time. But she still managed to make a big mistake.

Hillary Clinton did make one serious blunder: she allowed herself to be taken in by a then-slightly-fashionable criminological theory – since then not merely refuted by the facts but retracted by its most prominent academic sponsor – that the upsurge in homicides by teenagers reflected not merely the transient effects generated by the spread of the street markets for crack cocaine, but the emergence of a new class of violent juvenile “super-predators” whose psychological makeup was allegedly different from the makeup of the typical ordinary criminal. Based on that (as it turned out) fallacious bit of science, dozens of states passed laws allowing juveniles to be tried and sentenced as adults, with predictably disastrous results. On at least one occasion – after the passage of the bill, and the course of arguing for community policing – Clinton used the phrase “super-predator.”

You can weigh that as heavily as you like.

You should also weigh Kleiman’s criticism of Sanders:

Sanders, so far as the record shows, never talked about “super-predators.” That’s to his credit. But it’s less to his credit that he has rarely talked about, or tried to legislate on, crime at all.

Sanders’ theory seems to be that crime would mostly go away if the country offered better economic opportunity to poor people. That it’s hard to offer economic opportunity without first offering security of person and property doesn’t seem to have occurred to him; but then, it’s not much of a problem in Burlington. If Burlington had the crime rate of Brooklyn, or if Sen. Sanders had stayed in Brooklyn rather than moving to the peace, quiet, and safety of Burlington, he would have had to pay more attention to crime, because his constituents (of all races and economic classes, but especially minorities and the poor) would have been deeply worried by it.

Indeed, Sanders, more than most politicians or academics, might have noticed that crime control – protection of people and their property from victimization, and protection of the social and economic life of the community from the costs created by the fear of crime and the avoidance of victimization – is a first-order requirement of class justice and of racial justice.

Here’s my recommendation:

The Crime Bill became law 22 years ago. Maybe we could stop trying to blame our candidates for supporting it and focus on fixing both the unpleasant unintended consequences and the bad policies that were insisted upon by the Republicans.

For the most part, these two are the same things anyway.

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