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Effective review of the 1994 Crime Bill’s complicated legacy

By Douglas Berman

USA Today has this effective new piece about the impact and import of the 1994 Crime Bill under the headline “Fact check: 1994 crime bill did not bring mass incarceration of Black Americans.”  I recommend the whole thing, and here are excerpts:

The 1994 crime bill, signed by President Bill Clinton, was a grab-bag of crime-fighting measures, ranging from three-strike provisions mandating a life sentence for repeat offenders and funding for states to hire 100,000 additional police officers, to a Violence Against Women Act.

As chairman of the Judiciary Committee, then-Sen. Joe Biden drafted the bill, known formally as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which was billed by Democrats as a major crackdown on crime….

Lauren-Brooke Eisen, director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy think tank, says one of the most significant and long-lasting impacts of the legislation was the enticement to states to build or expand correctional facilities through the Violent Offender Incarceration and Truth-in-Sentencing Incentive Grants Program….

Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a campaign to end life imprisonment, told USA TODAY that the 1994 crime bill certainly encouraged the use of expanded incarceration by providing funding to the states for prison construction.  But he added that “mass incarceration was already well under way prior to the adoption of that legislation.”…

Regarding mass incarceration of Black Americans, the issue plays out against the reality of longstanding racial disparities in imprisonment rates….  A report on “Racial Disparity in U.S. Imprisonment across States and Over Time,” published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology in 2019, found that a large increase in Black imprisonment is traceable in many states to the crack epidemic in the mid-1980s.

This disparity, the report says, began to ease starting in the 1990s.  “Whatever its other effects, this suggests that the 1994 crime bill did not aggravate the preexisting racial disparity in imprisonment,” the report said….

Our research finds that while the crime bill did increase the prison population in states, it did not bring about a mass incarceration relative to earlier years.  Rather, it coincided with a slowdown in the annual grown of the state and federal prison population. Nor did it bring about mass incarceration of Black people, compared to before the bill was passed.

This USA Today piece references and links to some effective research on this topic, although it does not mention the papers recently published by the Council of Criminal Justice on this topic (one of which I authored).  These CCJ papers provide a similar accounting of the impact of the 1994 Crime Bill: