6.2 The Crime Bill Myth vs. Black Opinion

We do believe and emphatically support the bill’s goal to save our communities, and most importantly, our children. 

—40 African-American Religious Leaders

If you hear someone saying that Biden’s 1994 crime bill was like Jim Crow laws or was racist, ask them this: Do you think Black people were stupid back in 1994? Of course, they don’t think that. But how else can they explain that most Blacks, especially the best-informed, favored a bill that is claimed to be as racist as the Jim Crow laws?

The Nation, in an article obviously influenced by Michelle Alexander, tells us, “Representative Ron Dellums, co-founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, voted against it.” Like Alexander and the rest of the radical left, The Nation just happened to leave out that another 26 members of the Black Caucus, including its chairman, voted for the bill. Only 11 voted against it. This is easy to find out — much easier than the point about Dellums.

Right after saying Dellums voted against the bill, The Nation tells us: “So did 34 Senators,” as if those Senators had been liberal Democrats who agreed with Dellums. In fact, every one of them was a Republican.

So what was their point? That Ron Dellums must have been right because 34 Republicans agreed with him?! Their only possible point was to deceive their audience into believing their myth and damage the Democratic Party.

So why did the Black Caucus favor the crime bill? The best answer to this question may be a letter sent to the White House by 40 African-American religious leaders from around the country.

STATEMENT BY

AFRICAN-AMERICAN RELIGIOUS LEADERS

We believe there is no more important responsibility of society than to raise its children to become upstanding adults. … All of society — including government — must pitch in. That is why we support the President’s crime bill. While we do not agree with every provision in the crime bill,

We do believe and emphatically support the bill’s goal to save our communities, and most importantly, our children.

We believe and support the $8 billion in the bill to fund prevention programs such as grants for recreation, employment, and anti-gang and comprehensive programs to steer our young people away from crime.

We believe in drug treatment to help get federal and state inmates out of the cycle of dependency.

We believe in programs to fight violence against women.

We believe in banning assault weapons and preventing these deadly devices from falling into the hands of criminals and drug dealers.

We believe in putting 100,000 well-trained police officers on the streets of our most violence-plagued communities and urban areas.

We believe that 9-year-olds like James Darby of New Orleans, who was killed by a stray bullet only days after writing a plea to President Clinton to stop the violence, must have the opportunity to live and learn and grow in safe, decent communities.

For all these reasons, we support the crime bill and we urge others to join us in this crusade.

Although this letter was widely reported and is easily available, I have never found it reported by the radical-left myth makers.

Another endorsement that goes unmentioned by the myth makers came near the end of the negotiations over the bill. In July, ten Black mayors wrote to Black Caucus Chairman Kweisi Mfume saying, “We cannot afford to lose the opportunities this bill provides to the people of our cities.” The signatories included the mayors of Detroit, Cleveland, Atlanta and Denver.

Shortly before the bill was passed, the homicide victimization rate for Black males 14 and older was more than eight times higher than it was for White males in the same age range. This is why Black communities were so anxious to have more policing. They were not being foolish, and they were not falling for an evil Democratic plot. They were facing a vastly worse crime problem than the White population.

Republicans Set the Limits

A key fallacy of the crime bill myth is the assumption that the Democrats got exactly what they wanted. It’s true that Joe Biden was the author and that he worked on it for years. But no, he did not have a free hand or anything close to that. There were Republicans in Congress, a factor the radical left entirely overlooks.

Passing any high-profile law through the U.S. Congress was almost as contentious in 1994 as it is today. With crime as the nation’s #1 concern, there was bound to be a crime bill. It’s worth noting that most Republicans did everything they could to block the Democrats’ bill. Had they succeeded, there would have been a truly punitive Republican crime bill passed after the Republicans took back both houses of Congress in 1994.

Clinton’s strategy for passing the Biden bill was to talk tough on crime and give away what mattered least. That’s how he secured the Republican votes he needed to pass a bill that his Black constituents favored. For example, the bill added 60 new death penalty offenses. This sounded tough on crime and made it easier for members of Congress from conservative states and districts to support the bill. Radicals claim this is horrible, but don’t mention that there have been only four federal executions since the bill passed and probably none in the new categories. It looked tough, did nothing and helped get the bill passed.

The Democrats had to win over five semi-liberal Republicans. They scraped by with six. It was Republicans, not Joe Biden, who put the limit on how progressive the bill could be.

So What Caused Mass Incarceration?

The broader myth about mass imprisonment is simply that most of it is caused by drug laws that put people away for years or decades for minor drug offenses. We’ve all heard about this happening, and once is one time too many. But a few such stories don’t tell much about the few million who have landed behind bars. Neither does the Republican quote at the top of the previous chapter. And neither does Michelle Alexander’s book.

David Cole, the highly progressive National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, has reviewed two books that changed his mind about the causes of mass incarceration. Here is what Cole learned from Locked In, by John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham Law School.

[He] makes a powerful case that the war on drugs has had very little effect on incarceration rates overall… In state prisons, which account for a large majority of the nation’s inmate population, only 16 percent of prisoners have been convicted of a drug crime. Moreover, the vast majority of those in prison for drug-related offenses … have also been convicted on more serious charges, including violent crimes. All told, low-level, nonviolent drug offenders … make up only about 1 percent of all inmates in state prisons.

Pfaff makes the point that the shifting attitudes of District Attorneys regarding plea bargaining and which crimes to charge people with may have been the main cause of mass incarceration.

Cole also reviewed the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Locking Up Our Own, by James Forman Jr., a professor at Yale Law School and the son of a prominent civil rights leader. He served as a public defender in Washington, D.C., during the passage of the 1994 crime bill. As Cole explains,

Forman’s moving, nuanced, and candid account … shows that some of the most ardent proponents of tough-on-crime policies in the era that brought us mass incarceration were Black politicians and community leaders who supported these policies, not to subordinate African-Americans, but to protect them from the all-too-real scourges of crime and violence in many inner-city communities.

Here’s Forman’s first example of this. David Clarke, a White civil rights activist and Washington, D.C. city council member, tried to decriminalize marijuana in DC. Douglas Moore, a Black civil rights activist associated with Stokely Carmichael’s Black United Front, was opposed. So was the city’s black clergy as well as John Fauntleroy, one of the city’s first black judges. The city council voted it down.

Others who favored tough-on-crime policies at one time or another included Maxine Waters, the NAACP, Jesse Jackson and Charles Rangel, Harlem’s congressional representative.

[Image]

Joe Biden announcing the signing of the 1994 Crime Bill

What Were they Thinking?

Given where we are today, with calls to reimagine policing, it’s interesting to take a quick look at what the public was thinking in 1994. A year before the bill pasted, 80% of the population believed increasing the number of police would significantly decrease violent crime. And they soon got what they wanted. The most popular provision of the new crime bill was federal funding for 100,000 new police officers.

But the intention of Bill Clinton and his Attorney General Janet Reno was that the new police would be used for “community policing.” That idea was highly popular but none too clear. Simply put it meant “a return to cops on the beat.” Here’s how the Atlantic described it a few months before the bill was passed.

The 100,000 new officers are specifically intended to help revitalize neighborhood life; they’re supposed to be trained in community policing, a progressive model of police work embraced, at least rhetorically, by practically everyone. Community policing calls for a partnership of the police and local residents, and expands the focus of the police from arrests to intervention and preventive “problem solving.”

The bill also included money for crime-prevention programs, such as prison drug treatment, after-school recreation, job training, domestic violence, and rape prevention education. Clinton wanted more money for these, but these were the programs most vigorously opposed by Republicans who call them “crime pork.”

Conclusion

Promoted by the radical left, the crime bill myth erases the role of both Blacks and Republicans in influencing the 1994 crime bill. It also erases the very real problem of crime. That leaves White Democrats seeming to have fabricated the problem of Black crime and then passing a crime bill only to appeal to racist voters. And remember, those Democrats include not just Joe Biden and Bill Clinton, but Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and Bernie Sanders, to name just a few.

It’s hard to imagine a more dishonest stratagem, or one better designed to damage the Democratic Party. Of course, for radicals, the Democratic Party is what stands between them and the solution to all social problems, right after the revolution. So any tactic can be justified.