The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was written by Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, sponsored by Jack Brooks of Texas, was passed by Congress, and signed by President William Clinton on September 13, 1994. This crime bill was the largest in US history at that time and was intended to be the solution to combat the idiotic homicide, robbery, assault, and drug rates in urban hubs across America. Under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the new “three strikes” of being arrested ensued a mandatory life sentence, money was allocated toward growing the police force nationwide, granting $9.7 billion in funding to prisons, and diversifying death penalty-eligible crimes. The cynosure of these initiatives was largely punitive harming more people than helping. This research paper will discuss and investigate the change in incarceration rates, percentage or number of cases/reports of police brutality that were an effect of the crime bill, increase in percentage of prisoners on death row accredited to “three strike” principle, and overcharged sentences by using statistics, journals, and government documentation. Thus, this paper will examine the effects of William Clinton’s crime bill, The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 on law and order as well as disaffected segments of United States’ society ever since.
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was a means to an end to the violent war Americas minorities lived and died in. This crime bill allowed for prejudices to manifest and grow within American institutions. This allowed for the labelling and injury of America’s most colorful people. Within the pages of 30-billion-dollar crime bill, the “three strikes” law is enacted, the police force receives the funds it needs to be militarized against the greatest citizens, death penalty crimes are redefined, and funds are allocated to grow the prison system. These efforts never truly aided Americans rather caused much deeper detrimental effects within the communities who suffered most. Prisons would be filled past their maximum occupancy causing the use of the death penalty to make room for more prisoners.
The Crime Bill was not a response to an epidemic of crime instead it was a catalyst to exterminate America’s “undesirables”. The bill resulted in mass incarceration, police brutality, and overcharged sentences that disabled these communities to a much deeper degree. As if the “three-strike” principle were not enough, “truth-in-sentencing” laws, which required people convicted of violent crimes to serve at least 85% of their sentences causing an increase in those incarcerated. Crime rate naturally fluctuates in specific manners and is not remedied through negative reinforcements. This is proven by “[e]xperts who have studied the impact of the law say forces independent of the law were mostly responsible for the crime drop.” If America’s leaders truly wished to have positive effects on the communities that were suffering, there would have been programs not crime bills. Programs which cultivate changes in educational procedures, job creations, and mental development could have produced the changes which America sought. Therefore, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was never meant to address America’s crime rates instead it was meant to facilitate America’s growing undercover bias.
The cycle of repeatedly emphasizing the get-tough-on criminals became the exemplar of the Democratic party’s 20-year struggle to contest Republican dominance on the crime-fighting issue. Democrats were helplessly losing elections due to the fact they were unable to compete with Republican propositions on regulating crime and violence. The Republican and Democratic parties began to exploit crime and violence initiatives to gain leverage in elections in hopes of gaining power to push their own policies. The beginning of the rivalry using crime and violence began with the Southern Strategy during Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaigns. The Southern Strategy would lead to Republican dominance premised on the alleged hostility of Irishmen, Italians, and Poles, whose ethnic traits were conservative, toward Jews, Negroes, and affluent Yankees, whom history had made liberal. Nixon kept the silent majority happy throughout his presidency by continuing his propaganda with the war on drugs. President Nixon officially declared a war on drugs in June 1971. However, the war on drugs would exclusively target brown and black citizens, which would be an actualization of the demonization Nixon used in his campaign to win the election. All Americans, not just minorities, were committing drug crimes, but only minorities were being arrested. Nixon would begin to improperly and unjustly incarcerate minorities while allowing other the majority to use with privilege. Therefore, making both drug and crime bills racist by specifically filtering out certain profiles while overcorrecting others. President Ronald Reagan’s 23 anti-crime initiatives lead to legislation such as the weakening of the insanity defense, federal anti-drug laws, increased federal anti-drug funding, the initiation and expansion of prison and police programs, and the establishment of private organizations, oppressive forfeiture laws, abolishment of parole, and mandatory minimum sentences for offenses involving weapons. A notable feature of mandatory minimums was the massive gap between the amounts of crack and of powder cocaine that resulted in the same minimum sentence: possession of five grams of crack led to an automatic five-year sentence while it took the possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger that sentence. This led to Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Safe Streets Act of 1968” which sponsored federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies’ measures that led to mass incarceration of America’s “undesirables.” Whereas Nixon’s “War on Drugs” created the boom of mass incarceration, Ronald Reagan’s “Anti-Drug Abuse Acts” nurtured harsher penalties to deter the use of drugs, and LBJ’s “Safe Streets Act of 1968” supplemented the already drastic state of America’s criminal justice system. Efforts such as these helped to institutionalize crime control as a priority of the Federal government.
Superveniently, the National Security PAC, a precursor to Roger Stone and Paul Manafort’s NCPAC, began funding racist propaganda to undermine Michael Dukakis’ campaign. The notorious Willie Horton advertisement of 1988 stated Michael Dukakis did not support the death penalty and granted dangerous criminals weekend passes to be free however that was not the worst measure the Republicans took. The most horrific segment of the advertisement’s demonization of Willie Horton. A photograph of an average black man is shown following by a profusion of violent charges such as kidnap, rape, and several murder charges. The Republicans’ achieved their goal of vilifying minorities. William “Bill” Clinton, as well as Hillary, operates solely on the premise of gaining and or advancing their socioeconomic or political standing. Without the premise of monetary or influential value, Clinton is unlikely to commit to or achieve any specific act. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was the largest in US history in terms of cost, targeted areas, and scale. Comparatively, this bill allowed for private gain to be made through political capital and private prisons.
Bill Clinton was elected partially due to his support of reforms such as the Crime Bill. Therefore, without the passage of this Crime Bill the Clintons’ would have never earned the political capital which led to many of Hillary Clinton’s positions of power and Bill Clinton’s political influence.
The Crime Bill ended court supervision and decisions which led to overcrowding and violent, unsafe conditions in federal prisons. This gave private prisons the opportunity to profit off of federal, state, and local needs while receiving government subsidies. Clinton cut the federal workforce resulting in the Justice Departments contracting private prison corporations for the incarceration of undocumented workers and high security inmates. Profits are so good that now there is a new business: importing inmates with long sentences. The commission for a rentacell salesman is $2.50 to $5.50 per day per bed, the county gets $1.50 for each prisoner, and private prisons often times contract prison labor to private companies. Not to mention, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work that was designed for Third World labor markets by paying as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day to prisoners.
Beginning in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Congress became instrumental in creating laws and policies geared towards crime control. Although federal legislation directed toward crime did occur prior to the 1960s (e.g. Harrison Act of 1914; Volstead Act of 1919), congressional activity in the realm of crime control prior to the 1960s was utilized in an extremely limited fashion… President Johnson made crime a top priority in his administration, creating the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice in 1967, the purpose of which was to evaluate the current status of the American criminal justice system. The Commission’s final report made over two hundred specific recommendations, a number of which had called for an increased effort on the part of the Federal government to become more involved in the oversight and response to crime… Nixon set out to increase the penalties for crime and the likelihood of conviction in order to curb the appetites/impulses of potential offenders (Beckett, 1997; Matusow, 1984). But Nixon found himself with little Republican support in Congress and, therefore, was unable to influence legislation that reflected his ideology on crime control (Cronin, Cronin, & Milakovich, 1981). The Republicans began in the 1960s to propagandize and exaggerate America’s crime rate in order to push secret agendas held by their sponsors. Republicans had already begun to make American’s paranoid and convince them to live in fear, yet legislative effort will not occur until years to come. The Violent Crime and Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 has 90 different titles including, but not limited to Federal Death Penalty Act of 1993, Criminal Aliens Deportation Act of 1993, and Public Safety Partnership and Community Policing Act of 1993. Officially, the act is meant to allow grants to increase police presence, to expand and improve cooperative efforts between law enforcement agencies and members of the community to address crime and disorder problems, and otherwise to enhance public safety. However, an early version of the bill, the Biden Thurmond Crime Control Act of 1991, is described as being “a punishment bill, a retribution bill, a vengeance bill…” by Bernard Sanders.
The synopsis of the bill would be 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons, $2.6 billion in additional funding for the FBI, DEA, INS, United States Attorneys, and other Justice Department components, as well as the Federal courts and the Treasury Department, and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs. Not to mention, the bill intensified the government’s ability to deal with problems caused by criminal aliens.
The bill created several significant edicts regarding assault weapons, death penalty, domestic abusers and firearms, firearm licensing, fraud, gang crimes, immigration, juveniles, registration of sexually violent offenders, repeat sex offenders, three strikes, victims of crime, and created new crimes or enhances penalties for: drive-by-shootings, use of semi-automatic weapons, sex offenses, crimes against the elderly, interstate firearms trafficking, firearms theft and smuggling, arson, hate crimes and interstate domestic violence. Furthermore, the bill fathered numerous grant programs for states, neighborhoods, parks, and schools. The grants which were mostly authorized for six years were formula grants awarded to states or localities based on population, crime rate, and a combination of other factors. As a matter of fact, a grant for “Correctional Facilities/Boot Camps” is specifically stated to be a “formula and competitive grant program for state corrections agencies to build and operate correctional facilities, including boot camps and other alternatives to incarceration, to insure that additional space will be available to put – and keep – violent offenders incarcerated,” by the National Criminal Justice Reference Service. If states adopted “truth-in-sentencing” laws requiring violent offenders to serve at least 85% of their sentence they would receive 50% of the funds allotted to the grant itself. The grant received $24.5 million in 1995, yet from 1996-2000 $7.9 billion was authorized to be given to the grant.
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