Mass Incarceration and the Clintons

Bill and Hillary Clinton made news last year when both admitted regret in the roles they played in the 1990s in exacerbating the mass incarceration hysteria that gripped the nation in the 1980s and 1990s.  The Corporate Justice Blog highlighted as much at this time last year.  At that time, both President Clinton and the First Lady added fuel to the fire as reported by the New York Times:  “’Gangs and drugs have taken over our streets,’ President Bill Clinton said in 1994 as he signed a far-reaching anti-crime bill to bipartisan acclaim.  Defending the law at the time, a frightened era of crack cocaine wars and record murder rates, Hillary Clinton, as first lady, warned about an emerging generation of ‘super-predators’ — a notion she later repudiated.”

Now, the NY Times is reporting that the 1994 crime bill that is often blamed for massively increasing incarceration rates in the United States, signed into law by Bill Clinton, was simply a measure that piled-on to the draconian legislative provisions that criminalized drug abuse beginning in the Nixon and Reagan administrations.  Adding to this morass is data that shows that violent crime was already dropping, and rapidly, at the time the crime bill was signed in 1994 and despite notable drops in violent crime, law enforcement continued to lock up American citizens at record rates.  Why?  Consider the chart below:

As reported by the New York Times:  “’The trend of increased incarceration had already started two decades before 1994,’ said Jeremy Travis, the president of the John Jay College of Justice in New York. . . .