The Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994

Mr Clinton said at one point the 1994 crime bill caused "a 25-year low in crime, a 33-
year low in the murder rate". That is probably not true, though the causes of the drop in
crime have puzzled academics for years.
By the time the crime bill was passed, violent crime had begun its decline in the US. It
would continue to plummet throughout the 1990s before levelling out in the early 2000s.
Crediting a single piece of federal legislation is a stretch, says Mauer, and furthermore,
the White House should have taken the decrease in crime rates that was already
happening into consideration when it drafted the bill.
"We couldn't know then how much [the crime rate] would go down, but there should
have at least been some recognition of that before jumping on this 'tough on crime'
bandwagon," he says.
5. What effect will the bill have on Hillary Clinton's legacy and her bid for the
presidency?
Hillary Clinton has already admitted that the 1994 bill went too far. She apologised
for her use of the term "superpredator" when referring to a supposedly new kind of
remorseless juvenile criminal that ultimately never emerged. She has spoken repeatedly
on the campaign trail about ending mass incarceration. Her platform promises to
make the Fair Sentencing Act retroactive and to reduce nonviolent drug crime
mandatory sentences.
But other policies enacted by the Clintons had detrimental effects for communities of
colour and former inmates returning to society, even if they did not directly cause mass
incarceration. One part of the Crime Bill stripped all Pell Grant funding for college
education for prisoners, even though education is now seen as an effective tool against
recidivism. President Clinton championed a "one strike, you're out" policy for evicting
public housing tenants if they or their guests were involved in any criminal activity,
causing a jump in evictions and making it more difficult for former inmates to find
housing.
When the 1994 Crime Bill was being drafted, Elizabeth Hinton, assistant professor of
history and African and African American studies, says that the US Sentencing
Commission already knew that punitive criminal control and prison policies were
disproportionately affecting people of color. That, she says, is what people should make
a note of when deciding whether Mrs Clinton still should pay a political price for the
policies of the 1990s.
"Part of this is not just reckoning with the Clinton legacy, but reckoning with the policy
choices that both Democrats and Republicans have made since the Civil Rights
Movement - replacing social welfare policies with punitive measures," she says.
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