John Pfaff: My latest is up now in Slate. It’s an election year where crime is an issue, so essential to raise this issue sooner than later: THE 1994 CRIME BILL DID NOT CAUSE MASS INCARCERATION. It didn’t. It. Just. Did. Not.

My latest is up now in Slate. It’s an election year where crime is an issue, so essential to raise this issue sooner than later: THE 1994 CRIME BILL DID NOT CAUSE MASS INCARCERATION. It didn’t. It. Just. Did. Not.

Joe Biden’s Most Infamous Law Still Haunts Him. For All the Wrong Reasons.slate.com Thirty years after it passed, it’s still totally misunderstood.

The amount of money offered—$10B over 5-6 years, in exchange for policy changes that would last decades—wasn’t enough. Congress authorized $10B, states only claimed $3B. They left $7B in “free money” on the table! And almost all states said the bill didn’t move the policy needle.

The payments didn’t start until 1995-96. How can small grants that came on-line TWO DECADES AFTER prisons started rising CAUSE the rise? Plus, prison growth SLOWED over the 1990s. In 2001, the last year of the grants, state prison pops FELL! For the first time since 1972!

And yeah, COPS funded some extra cops for a few years, introduced a culture shift of sorts via community policing. But all arrests—for serious AND minor crimes alike—have been flat or falling from the 1990s to today. So total police inflows to the crim legal system? DOWN, since 1994.

It. Just. Didn’t. Do. Much. But it’s a fun target, bc it’s easy, and it suggests a simple fix. Easy, bc it pins the blame on DC, on “them” buying off “us.” But mass incarceration is a local issue, and its causes are local. We did this, not them.

And it suggests an easy fix: get Congress to pass a new bill to reverse this. But that won’t work. The 1994 Bill couldn’t incentivize doing what was politically easy. Congress lacks the will to bribe us to do what is hard. The fix will also be slow and local, not fast and national.

The 1994 Bill is also an easy target bc the story it tells—“they offered money, and now this happened!”—is simple and emotional. The Fed laws that DO matter, like PLRA and AEDPA, are complex and technical—hard to get ppl excited abt, but deadly bc of that.

Couple things were overturned by the Supreme Court. The sex offender registry. Banning guns for domestic abusers was an addition to the 1994 violence against women act which was umbrella’d under the crime bill back then. banned marital rape. Banned semi autos and AR15s

The people most against the 1994 crime bill are pro gun or against the sex offender registry and take David Koresh‘s side completely.

People think there’s this inherently noble “praxis” to pretend mass incarceration was caused by the crime bill and ignore how its biggest champions were people who served the communities most effected so prepare to deal with that.

You're right, Joe Biden has been a champion of civil rights his entire career 🙄

“I like pancakes” “why do you hate waffles!?” This is the kind of attitude we should try and leave at Twitter.

I'm not his biggest fan, but fucking everybody was "tough on crime" back then... His opponent was drastically worse, even back then.

Sure, that's exactly what he said. 🙄

I guess I could point out that he's enthusiastically arming a rogue nuclear apartheid state to commit genocide, but you probably don't care about that

I also like to bring up things we aren't talking about to grind my personal ax in threads.

Yeah. Being against genocide and a racist old senile man who props up the carceral and police state to crack down on Americans is my personal axe to grind

Okay, well, sharing that article or agreeing with it does not automatically mean a person support genocide because - and I'm not sure you understand this - they're talking about two completely different things.

I guess I’ll go vote for the genocidal white supremacist then! Oh wait, the other one

Implying that Crime Bill Joe has been anything but a leading light for policing, OVER policing, & racist & fascist authoritarianism is to ignore who Joe Biden is & has always been. There is no amount of lipstick that can pretty up that authoriatarian "fund the police" pig, nor his TopCop Veep.

Holy shit this is desperate.

Now tell us why no one can get rid of student debt through bankruptcy.

You. Are. Wrong.

www.americanprogress.org/article/1994...

The 1994 Crime Bill Continues to Undercut Justice Reform—Here’s How to Stop Itwww.americanprogress.org Lawmakers who are considering what should follow the FIRST STEP Act, the federal sentencing and prison reform effort, must begin by reversing the infrastructure that the 1994 federal crime bill create...

www.aclu.org/news/smart-j...

How the 1994 Crime Bill Fed the Mass Incarceration Crisis | ACLUwww.aclu.org

youtu.be/uxaDqkL4t2I

Criminalizing Blackness: The Impacts of the 1994 Crime Bill & 1996 Immigration Bill on Black Peopleyoutu.be A question that every Black immigrant advocate has been asked at one point or another is how the U.S. criminal injustice system impacted the U.S. immigration system. And the answer is always: “In every way possible.” We come together for “Criminalizing Blackness”, a conversation with leaders across these two deeply connected movement spaces to break down the major impacts of the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1996 Immigration Bill on Black people. We’ll discuss the joint report we built together, taking a close look at how the 1994 “Crime Bill” paved the way for the 1996 Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. We’ll cover how they’re still impacting our communities today and what could be done to address the anti-Blackness in both our criminal legal system and civil immigration system.

www.americanprogress.org/article/3-wa...

3 Ways the 1994 Crime Bill Continues to Hurt Communities of Colorwww.americanprogress.org Lawmakers must dismantle the crime bill’s harmful policies and enact solutions that reduce reliance on incarceration, prevent unnecessary criminalization, and eliminate the draconian laws keeping mill...

m4bl.org/wp-content/u...

First, not disagreeing with the thread about impacts of different policies. Second, years ago I analyzed state prison trends by race. 1995 shows up as an inflection point: overall, Black prison admissions started going down while White admissions went up. www.ssc.wisc.edu/soc/racepoli...

Race, Mass Incarceration, and Bill Clinton’s Policies – Race, Politics, Justicewww.ssc.wisc.edu

That's interesting, thanks! How did you deal with the race data in the NCRP, though? My talks with the BJS ppl have left me more-or-less terrified to use it, given the 97-step algorithm they have to try to correct the errors in it for national data (which can't be reduced down to state levels).

Not saying the data are perfect. But they are instructive and mesh with other data. I did a bunch of other unpublished analysis that I felt needed to be re-done and some work with new data. A lot of this is what was going on in poorer White places. www.ssc.wisc.edu/soc/racepoli...

White rural imprisonment rates – Race, Politics, Justicewww.ssc.wisc.edu

Thanks!

also www.ssc.wisc.edu/soc/racepoli...

Education, Poverty, and Rural vs. Urban Incarceration Rates – Race, Politics, Justicewww.ssc.wisc.edu

Because it put minimums so the white ones wouldn’t just get away. That was the point of minimums. And they were targeting what happened at Waco when writing.

Not disputing the local emphasis. I think you might underplay the signaling impact from the feds. It was Big News in 1994, if my faulty memory serves. If the feds had passed a treatment/housing bill, that shifts the discourse, and maybe impacts the local.

Portland/Seattle supports your view. Portland decriminalized drugs. Seattle didn’t. Both then had problems with overdoses and „street disorder.“ Both have chosen increased incarceration now.

Washington state went one year with effective decrim cause our drug law was overturned by the Supreme Court. So it was at the same time. Same thing happened.

I don’t think Blake and decrim are similar. But even if you do think they were the same, both places are again doing a thing that doesn’t work: putting people in jail for nonviolent crimes. If jail is important, then it would need to be hooked into support and services. But we always stop at jail.

They didn’t enforce the drug laws that year. Oh so you gonna include corporate crimes?

Pfaffing about on this one.

We often focus on big, symbolic targets that are a small chunk of the problem. I also think about the push against for-profit prisons. They’re a small part of the system, and usually not the ones with the worst conditions

But they (rightly) feel gross, so we target them and ignore state-run prisons where the vast majority of the prison population and cruel conditions actually exist So if the goal is to cut the carceral state, focusing on the wrong things and misidentifying the causes will make reforms less effective

📌

Say in the fucking headline!!! JFC half the people don’t read past that. I’d read it if it said that in the headline otherwise it looks like a useless piece. I know y’all don’t make headlines but maybe try to do something. Every major newspaper also suffers from this disease.

What about the 86 drug bill?

No, I don’t think that did much either:

Not really, bc those only applied to the Feds, and the Feds hold only 10% of the prison population, and drugs are at most half of the Fed population. So less than ~5% of the national prison pop comes from those. Plus, this isn't a comprehensive take on Biden. It's about the 1994 Crime Bill.

Thank you, I thought I read all the replies but that one didn't show in my feed.

There were a lot of threads today!

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