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.
Clinton gets a lot of flack for supporting things that pretty much everybody in the Democratic party supported at the time. The 1994 Crime Bill passed the Senate 95-4. It was more contentious in the House but, the support was primarily from the left, not the right. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/103-1994/h416
And Sanders voted for it too.
I’d be willing to cut the Clinton camp some slack on this if:
A.) Petty reason – when the chickens came home to roost for O’Malley via the Baltimore riots, they weren’t so relentlessly hypocritical about smearing him and acting like they were so above the frankly autocratic and racist policies that let to said riots. I remember the unmitigated glee from the Clinton camp last May when the riots started and permanently sunk O’Malley’s campaign, as if because they were able to get the last musical chair they were so above it all.
B.) The fallout from this policy was so awful. Yes, you should suspect incompetence instead of evil, but remember Grey’s Law: “Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”
Got to admit that it’s one of those things that look bad in hindsight. I can’t blame Hillary or Bernie on this one, nor do I think everything in that bill was bad including sentencing teenagers as adults for heinous violent crime.
From the beginning, the Bill Clinton approach to crime policy was a political gambit to cover his flank against a Willie Horton attack. The more Clinton closed that gap, the crazier the Republican policy positions became. That is an important part of the political context. And so is the fact that 1994 was the year that the so-called Gingrich Revolution occurred.
What is significant this year is the reality of bad contracts with private prison operators that force mass incarceration and the scramble to find criminals to incarcerate. Until the 1970s, except for cross-state-line organized crime or flight from law enforcement, the federal government was not highly involved in criminal policy and law enforcement; it was a state and local matter.
Nixon nationalized the issue to draw Southern and urban ethnic Democratic voters to his campaign. And kept his promise with the Law Enforcement Assistance Program (LEAP) that subsidized state and local law enforcement and led to the relationships that militarized a good proportion of the police departments in the country after 9/11.
The Reagan administration’s privatization of government raised the notion of privatizing prisons. Conservative governors and prison entrepreneurs rushed to implement this approach to supply prison jobs in small communities to replace manufacturing jobs that had been exported. This accelerated after NAFTA.
That is the mass incarceration problem; rural small-town jobs depend on privatized prisons.
As crime goes down, the support for increased support of law enforcement and prison construction goes up, leading to pressures to fill all those beds.
Sanders and Clinton need to be talking about the current realities instead of votes from twenty-two years ago when Republicans were exploiting fears.
What we know is that the US will not solve the problem of crime through the spurious “getting tough” that conservatives have advocated for fifty years. Local governments with conservative sheriffs and conservative states have already field tested all of the conservative ideas through oodles of boondoggles.
Sanders is correct in the limited sense that individual prosperity brings reduced crime rates, divorce rates, and spouse abuse. And that a balanced prosperity that raises incomes at the bottom and increases employment will reduce crime in high-crime areas by pulling people from the informal economy back into the formal economy. He is incorrect if he thinks that the informal economy or certain forms of organized crime will disappear. But I don’t think he is naive about crime; he just wants to build a basis for getting rid of the immense amount of waste in government spending driven by being “tough on crime”.
Academic nitpicking about the causes of crime really are irrelevant in the rhetoric that campaigns must deploy in a marketing-style campaign. Bernie is speaking to African-Americans and Latinos, without losing whatever white demographic he is currently pulling. Clinton is trying to hold on to her minority support and her white support at the same time in very complicated political environments. Anything about 1994 is low-hanging rhetorical fruit for both campaigns. And only one of them did actually vote although the other was strongly influential in Congressional legislation if you believe the two-fer notion. And that point is likely to have been the Violence against Women Act.
Both of these candidates need to stop playing the usual political games with respect to the other’s record and talk about the current situation with respect to criminal justice and prisons and what it means for future policy and legislation.
This: That is the mass incarceration problem; rural small-town jobs depend on privatized prisons.
Better have an idea how to return economic activity to these burgs if drug laws are made rational.
Conservatives are as keynesian as liberals, but they only want to spend on war and oppresive law enforcement. Replace war keynesianism with peace keynesianism: build schools, solar panels, hospitals…
The crime bill described here was a disaster. Period. Whatever the merits of its provisions purported to protect women or the assault weapons ban, the terrible damage done by its key provisions for funding the massive increase of prisons and addition of 100,000 police were far more destructive. There’s simply no comparison. The costs of the bill on disadvantaged, mostly minority citizens far, far outweigh its purported benefits. And all of us, save the criminal-prison complex that reaped a massive windfall, have paid the price over the past 20 years because of it.
Here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, about the only major real estate developments during the late 90s were two huge prison buildings in the downtown of our city, buildings that remain there as a monument to the racist Republican/DLC failure to address social justice issues. The damage done by the increased police forces in our cities is everywhere in evidence; there are simply too many police and as a result too many recruits are ill-suited for the job and corruption and waste are rampant throughout our criminal justice system.
Those that recklessly pushed a steady stream of lies based on notions like “super-predators” (Hillary Clinton went further in her pandering on the subject, likening them to dogs that needed to be “brought to heel”) should damned well be held accountable for these failures however long ago they committed those sins. Their promotion of prisons and a bloated police force ruined the lives of thousands of those already most at risk in our violent culture, and are directly responsible for the deaths of too many innocent men an women that needed the support of social services that were eliminated by the same vengeful, immoral political forces.
Hillary Clinton in January 1996.
“Here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin…”
Wow, me too.
I thought that the redevelopment of the Third Ward was mostly in the 90s, but could be wrong.
Not to quibble, but Third Ward hasn’t had any major real estate development really, though overall it’s come a long way since the utter stagnation there in the 70s through the late 80s. And my point is not to diminish the renaissance of downtown as a result of Norquist’s demolition of the east-west freeway that happened mostly after he left office in the late 90s, early 2000s IIRC. And downtown development has been booming the past four or five years, I think.
I think it is very difficult to make the case that the 1994 crime bill had much to do with mass incarceration or that federal policies did all that much.
Mass incarceration began fifteen years before the crime bill. The prison population grew by 250% in the years before the crime bill. Crime actually was through the roof. Overcrowding in state prisons was a real problem. Having enough cops was also a real issue.
In the fifteen years after the crime bill, the prison population only grew by 40% until it peaked in 2009.
Mass incarceration – and addressing it – is mostly an issue for individual states. Only 13% of the prison population is in the federal system. The vast majority of the incarcerated are in state prison because they were convicted under state law in a state court.
Thank you for the context.
To add: Crime – though studies has in particular been focused on murder rates (generally criminal, generally reported, so good for comparisions) – increases in the 70ies and 80ies and goes down in the 90ies in most of the western world.
I think this theory is the best right now:
Lead: America’s Real Criminal Element | Mother Jones
Or rather, I have not seen any that can compete as an explanation across the board. It needs to hold for at least Europe and US, so political actions and rock music and alcohol consumption and even poverty, generally fits poorly.
Though I admit I would like to see more research on the topic, preferably comparing when lead is banned in different states and comparing variations in crime later on, lead emissions is for now the best explanation of the late 20th century bump in crime.
Interesting that the issue in Flint MI is the pollution of drinking water in a black-majority city with lead.
The governor styles himself as #onetoughnerd and has systematically gone after destroying black-majority cities in Michigan — Detroit, Benton Harbor, Pontiac, Flint.
Was dawdling in Flint an attempt to create a crime wave to justify black oppression? Is the nerd governor that clueless outside the IT and business management world? Does the word “lead” have no associations at all with the Republican leadership of Michigan?
Stupidity, informed malice, or both?
I used to enjoy stopping overnight in Benton Harbor and having a fine breakfast at a restaurant near the motel. No more. The last two times police sirens wailed all night and car doors slammed repeatedly in the parking lot. I had thought the first time was a fluke. That was many years ago. Now I just drive further North before stopping. I don’t even stop for food or gasoline. It’s a shame because it’s a nice town on the lake, right off the interstate, a prime gateway location to the orchard region. In the ’50s it was a prime tourist location.
Someone destroyed that town.