This is Part 4 of a series. Earlier parts are here.
The crime bill myth circulated by far-left (and at least partially believed by almost all Democrats) holds that in 1994 all Democratic Senators and President Bill Clinton passed a deliberately racist bill, that targetted mainly Blacks just like the Jim Crow laws did.
What is never mentioned is that immediately after the law was passed, the rate of increase of Black incarceration was cut in half and came to an end in five years. But the inceration rate of whites didn’t slow during that period and continued to increase for another 15 years.
Impact of the 1994 Crime Bill
A story in the radical-left magazine, The Nation, claims the 1994 bill “inaugurated” the “era of mass incarceration.” Others just say it caused a spike in it. Let’s take a look.
Obviously, the bill was decades too late to have “inaugurated” the era of mass incarceration. The Nation just lied about that. It did not cause a spike in incarceration either. But the real question is not about grand totals, it’s about what happened to Blacks. In particular, did the 1994 bill target Blacks? The next graph shows the Black imprisonment rate.
This graph shows that the state and federal imprisonment rate for Blacks was increasing most rapidly just before the 1994 crime bill and that this increase slowed immediately and stopped after five years. Meanwhile, the White incarceration rate continued its upward trend for at least another fifteen years, adding well more than 50% to its 1994 level. And the Black incarceration rate continued down during this same period. The raw data can’t prove much, but it cuts strongly against the view that the 1994 crime bill was biased against Blacks.
Note that I am not saying the 1994 crime bill was all positive. Much of it was designed to get the Republican votes needed to pass it. And I’ve always been opposed to incarceration except when needed for public safety.
While the black incarceration growth rate was stopping from 1994 — 1999, the white rate didn’t slow and then it kept growing for at least another 15 years. Here are some excerpts from a 2017 story in the Washington Post.
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.
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