The Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994

programmes "designed with significant input from experienced police officers",
however, the bulk of the funds were dedicated to measures that are seen as punitive
rather than rehabilitative or preventative.
2. Why was it passed and who supported it?
At the time, violent crime was seen as out of control in the US. Starting in 1987,
the homicide rate in the US was increasing by 5% each year, peaking in 1991 with 9.8
deaths per every 100,000 people. Many of those victims were young African
Americans. Robbery and assault rates had exploded beginning in the late 1960s, and
the crack cocaine epidemic was devastating the nation's urban centres.
The bill had bipartisan support, and easily passed both the House and Senate. The
Clintons have pointed out that both black politicians and community leaders backed the
law, and in general supported increased law enforcement in order to help quell street
violence destroying communities.
But a recent New York Times op-ed calls this a "selective hearing" of what African
American leaders were asking for and points out that members of the Congressional
Black Caucus asked for provisions in the bill that were left out.
"Policy makers pointed to black support for greater punishment and surveillance,
without recognizing accompanying demands to redirect power and economic resources
to low-income minority communities," according to the piece, written by three Ivy
League professors of history and African American studies. "When blacks ask for better
policing, legislators tend to hear more instead."
3. Did it cause mass incarceration?
No. But many believe that it may have amplified effects that were already under way.
Historians point out that there had already been decades worth of punitive crime control
laws that ramped up the rate of incarceration in the US, including the Ronald Reagan
Anti-Drug Abuse Acts which established mandatory minimum sentences for drug
possession, or Lyndon Johnson's Safe Streets Act of 1968, which increased the flow of
federal money to local and state police. Many pieces of punitive crime legislation predated
the 1994 bill, on the federal, state and local levels. The prison population had
tripled in the two decades that preceded the act.
"The feds are very much a reactor in criminal law, not a creator. Much of this was
already well under way," says John Pfaff, professor of law at Fordham University, who
argues the actions of local prosecutors are a better starting point when tracing the roots
of mass incarceration.
Page 20 of 190