The 1994 Crime Bill Wasn’t Actually Bad

I read an article today and there was one line that stood out: “…and as legislation like the 1994 crime bill passed, mass incarceration rose dramatically.” The article isn’t even about the 1994 Crime Bill, which is why the line stood out. It’s just kind of a throwaway line I’ve seen before, asserting a common knowledge that 1994 Crime Bill was bad and responsible for mass incarceration. Except it wasn’t.

The 1994 Crime Bill has become a symbol of failure to many abolitionist reformers. Its passage coincided with the start of largest sustained drop in murder in US history. Was that all because of the crime bill? No. But some of it was. Did the Crime Bill cause Mass Incarceration? No. But it didn’t reduce it, either. The 1994 Crime Bill coincided with a continued long-term increase in US incarceration. But that trend was long established, and for what it’s worth, the rate of increase slowed after 1994. The Federal impact on incarceration is always going to be small, since the vast majority of prisoners are in state prisons convicted under state law.

So why do people in 2023 want to assert the Crime Bill’s (questionable) impact on incarceration while completely ignoring its (questionable) impact on crime?

The 1994 Crime Bill was (somewhat like “bail reform” today) multifaceted. It included:

1. An assault weapons ban.
2. Expands the Federal death penalty.
3. Prohibits gun sales and possession to people who have restraining orders.
4. Increased licensing standards for gun dealers.
5. Registration for sexually violent offenders.
6. Three strikes you’re out for federal violent offenders and drug traffickers.

The Crime Bill also provided funding for the Brady Bill, Byrne Grants, community policing, community schools, jails and prisons, drug courts, battered women’s shelters, investment in poor communities, drug court, police corps, and much much more.

As ace criminologist Richard Rosenfeld put it: “One critically important legacy of the Crime Bill that often is overlooked is its impact on criminal justice research. The congressional appropriation authorized by the Crime Bill led to the largest investment ever in U.S. criminal justice research and evaluation. Prior to the bill’s passage – and for a good while after – criminal justice practice and policy typically were based on anecdote and instinct.” I would Rosenfeld glosses over some of the Police Foundation research in the 1970s and in the 1980s, but his point stands.

In 2016 anti-incarcerationist John Pfaff wrote this:

We know the act didn’t cause mass incarceration: Prison populations started rising around 1974, and by 1994 they had roughly tripled, from 300,000 to over one million. It’s almost surely the case that America was the world’s largest jailer well before the act was passed. So if the act didn’t cause mass incarceration, the question becomes: Did it help continue to drive it? The answer, by and large, is no.

Lauren-Brooke Eisen at the Brennan Center wrote this:

Though the crime bill was not responsible for the entire drop in crime, it likely helped — not by locking people up, but by putting more cops on the street…. Crime is at its lowest levels today. And mass incarceration is near its highest. The crime bill likely played a role in the crime decline, but it also certainly increased the number of Americans behind bars…. Although incarceration was already rising steadily before the crime bill, several of its provisions helped increase incarceration even further.

There were good parts and bad parts of the Crime Bill. But keep in mind their opinions were the progressive/liberal party line at least until 2016. It’s silly and even dishonest to summarize it simply like this: “And as legislation like the 1994 crime bill passed, mass incarceration rose dramatically.” Well, yes, but murders dropped dramatically, and there was an assault weapons ban, and money for a lot of good programs.

So why do politicians get heckled for supporting the bill? Why do people, often people who were not alive in 1994, consider it so important for people to link “1994 Crime Bill” and “Bad”? What makes the crime bill so anathema to reformers is that it worked. The anti-policing crowd doesn’t like bad policing. But there’s nothing they dislike more than good policing. Because they’re against policing. And the Crime Bill was an expansion of the criminal justice system, undoubtedly.

But if the crime bill didn’t bring down, what did? Probably the spread of the NYPD crime fighting philosophy, that the primary focus of policing should be to prevent crime and disorder. It started in NYC and quickly spread elsewhere. As hard as it is to imagine, this was a radically new concept in 1994. For police! My new book (out later this year) is about this. This wasn’t part of the Crime Bill, but the Crime Bill didn’t hurt.

So in 2023 progressive abolitionist needs to disparage one of the rare success stories of federal legislation, bipartisan at that. I wish we could pass similar but better legislation today. Mostly for the funds for research and some limited but real gun control.

Opposition to the 1994 Crime Bill is similar to asserting, “We can’t go back to the failed policing of the past.” Well, not only could we, we should. And it wasn’t failed! I once thought years of declining crime and incarceration was the goal. But apparently that’s not progressive enough because it happened through more and better policing while more criminals were being locked up. If you want to abolish the criminal legal system, then the success of policing and prosecution is a flaw, not a feature.

We need less “reimagining” of the criminal justice and as long as violence is going up, we should focus more on reconstituting it.