The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. …
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
—John Ehrlichman, 1994
Nixon’s aide on domestic affairs
(convicted in the Watergate scandal)
Ricky Ray Rector was a brain-damaged killer who barely knew his own identity, let alone the fate that awaited him. At his last meal, he saved his pecan pie to eat the next morning. Just weeks before the critical New Hampshire primary, Bill Clinton proved his toughness on crime by flying back to Arkansas to oversee that execution.
At least that’s how Michelle Alexander tells the story to score points against the Democrats in her famous 2010 book, The New Jim Crow. That book launched the crime bill myth. She used the story again in February 2016 in a widely distributed article, “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote,” in an attempt to knock Clinton out of the race. Of course, the same “logic” applies to Joe Biden 100 times over — he wrote the bill. Hillary had nothing to do with it as she was completely absorbed by her healthcare initiative.
The darkest of myths. The Ricky Ray Rector anecdote is one cornerstone of the 1994 crime bill myth, a myth that could not be more vicious or more wrong.
The crime bill was favored by most of the Black community, including most radicals. Biden and Clinton pushed it as far as they could in the direction the Black community wanted, but they were stopped by Republicans, to whom the radicals give a free pass.
The myth claims the opposite, that Biden and Clinton produced “arguably the most immoral ‘anti-crime’ bill in American history.” So wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic. Of course, he meant the “most racist” crime bill in American history. Nothing could be more slanderous.
During the protests over the murder of George Floyd, a Politico post, “How young black voters could break Biden — and why Democrats are worried,” noted that Biden sponsored the 1994 crime bill and reported,
Biden might need to acknowledge his past support for a criminal justice system that’s long discriminated against minorities, said black organizers and Democratic operatives in swing states.
The clear insinuation here is that Biden supported racial discrimination by the criminal justice system, a charge that is utterly false. But because of the power of this myth, adherence to which is enforced by online radicals, if he were to explicitly deny this insinuation he would be attacked as an unrehabilitated racist. Such is the power of mass hysteria.
The only way out of this trap is for liberals, who are not wedded to such dangerous nonsense, to learn a bit of history and inform their friends. Mass incarceration is a deadly serious problem and blaming the Democrats will not help solve it. Instead it will only help the Republicans who started this tragedy.
Back to Ricky Ray Rector. Researching the 1994 crime bill, I’d come across copycat versions of Alexander’s damning anecdote a dozen times. I just could not understand why Clinton didn’t pardon a man who had no real concept of what he was doing when he committed his crime. It sounded completely heartless (as it was intended to). So I looked up the Ricky Ray Rector story. It only took a minute, and it changed my understanding of the situation forever.
In 1981, Rector and friends drove to a dance hall. When one of them couldn’t pay the $3 cover charge, Rector pulled out a .38-caliber pistol and shot the place up, wounding two and killing another. Three days later, he agreed to surrender, but only to the well-liked Officer Robert Martin, whom he had known since childhood. Rector arrived at his mother’s house, greeted Officer Martin, waited until the officer turned his back, and shot him dead. Rector then walked out and shot himself in the head, resulting only in a frontal lobotomy, not in his intended suicide.
Rector himself had chosen death but missed and accidentally condemned himself to a life of terrifying hallucinations.
At that time, almost 80% of the country was in favor of the death penalty for murder. I’d guess that for a double murder that included shooting one of the community’s best-liked police officers in the back, the percentage would have been closer to 95%, especially in Arkansas. Had Clinton commuted Rector’s sentence, he would have stood no chance of being elected president. Instead, he would have cemented the Democrats’ undeserved reputation for favoring criminals over the general public.
Considering that Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed legal scholar and that this is one of her prized anecdotes, Rector’s back story is a lot to leave out. But as you will see, radical-left myths more often deceive with omissions than with lies.
‘The New Jim Crow’
Alexander’s book is the bestselling book on the criminal justice system — ever. The claim she makes with her title is that federal crime bills — Republican and Democratic — were all designed with the “well-disguised” intent to function “in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow,” the segregation laws overturned by the civil rights movement.
Mass incarceration has nothing to do with segregated lunch counters, schools, buses, or other public places targeted by the Jim Crow laws. So the “striking similarity” to Jim Crow comes down to stopping some Blacks (ex-felons) from voting. Again, she leaves out a few facts. These laws stop a small fraction of the number stopped by Jim Crow. They stop roughly as many Whites as Blacks. And instead of being free to White society, these stopped votes cost about $100 billion a year — the cost of mass incarceration. No, this is ridiculous. Stopping Black votes is an afterthought, not the purpose of crime bills.
The book’s title is a deliberate misrepresentation that has convinced many Democrats that their party has deliberately done something evil.
Mass Incarceration
Mass incarceration — which has hit the Black community hardest — is dreadfully damaging and needs to be dramatically reduced. But misunderstanding how it came about and what is causing it will not help. A story in the radical-left magazine, The Nation, tells us, “Candidate Hillary now declares that ‘the era of mass incarceration must end,’ without quite saying who inaugurated it.” The article focuses exclusively on the Clintons, so the innuendo is perfectly clear — the Clintons inaugurated the era of mass incarceration. (In a primary debate, Cory Booker called Biden the “architect of mass incarceration.”)
Take a look at the graph above. Mass incarceration started in 1974, twenty years before the Clinton bill supposedly “inaugurated” that era. The Nation could not have been more misleading if it had directly lied about that. And the 1994 bill did not cause a spike in incarceration either. Not even Michelle Alexander makes such claims. They are simply distortions made by the radical left as they tell and retell their myth.
But these deceptions show the real purpose of this myth. The radicals use it to attack the Democratic Party, so they simply leave out the first 20 years and the fact that it was the Nixon administration that consciously started using long drug sentences to harass and vilify Black radicals and White hippies. Their purpose was, of course, to win racist votes.
Was the Bill Racist?
The real question is not about grand totals, as shown in the graph above; it’s about what happened to Blacks. Did the 1994 bill target Black people? This second graph shows the Black imprisonment rate.
The state and federal imprisonment rate for Blacks was increasing most rapidly in the two years before the 1994 crime bill. Immediately after the bill was passed, this increase slowed dramatically and, after five years, stopped and turned around.
This graph is taken from a 435-page report of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, published in 2014, the most complete study ever made of The Growth of Incarceration in the United States.
There is no indication in the data that the crime bill exacerbated the problem of Black incarceration. Without the bill, the imprisonment rate would have continued to increase. With the bill, the rate slowed immediately and stopped in just five years after accelerating for 20. You could not hope for much more than that because the programs that the bill set up took time to implement.
What is even more surprising are the changes in the White imprisonment rate. Although that is much lower, it accounts for about the same total number of prisoners because the White population is so much larger. And the increases in the White rate did not slow immediately after the bill’s passage. The incarceration rate of Whites continued long after the Black rate had stopped increasing in 1999.
At the end of 2017, The Washington Post published “A mass incarceration mystery,” confirming this.
Between 2000 and 2015, the imprisonment rate of black men dropped by more than 24 percent. At the same time, the white male rate increased slightly, the BJS numbers indicate.
Among women, the trend is even more dramatic. From 2000 to 2015, the black female imprisonment rate dropped by nearly 50 percent; during the same period, the white female rate shot upward by 53 percent.
I can find absolutely no data indicating that the overall effect of the 1994 crime bill was racist either intentionally or accidentally. If anything, the data indicate the opposite.
What is certain is that this is a radical-left myth designed to slander high-profile Democrats and the Democratic Party as a whole. It’s time that good Democrats stood up and put a stop to this deception. A good time to do this would be before November 3, 2020.
Ripped Apart
