America's new enemy - the 1994 crime bill - Editorial

Progressive, The, Oct, 1994

America is in the grip of a crime scare. As in the Red Scare of the 1950s, the scariest part is that the enemy is among us, around every corner. Now as then, the Government uses the hysteria to justify taking harsh, expensive, and invasive measures in the name of public safety.

"Are we or are we not willing to put our votes where our speeches are and do something about the tide of crime and violence and fear that engulfs our nation?" Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell demanded before the final vote on the crime bill. Fear is the key word here, since the tide of crime and violence is actually going out. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of households touched by crime has declined 25 per cent since 1975. During the same period, the murder rate held remarkably steady. But fear is definitely on the upsurge.

The President's longing for a legislative victory, Congressional Democrats' desire to look tough, and media sensationalism around a few white, middle-class victims of crime--particularly twelve-year-old Polly Klaas in California and the passengers mowed down by a gunman on the Long Island Railroad--set the stage for the current wave of crime hysteria. Politicians of both parties are tripping over each other to lead the assault on America's new enemy--that personification of evil, the anonymous "criminal element."

The worst thing about the crime bill is that it represents a fundamental misapprehension about what makes us safe. A cop on every corner, harsher punishments, and more prison cells may sound like steppedup security, but, in fact, these measures do nothing to improve our neighborhoods or reduce crime over the long term.

Most of the money in the $30.2 billion crime bill will go to fund more of the same tried-and-failed, punitive policies of the last twenty years:

[paragraph] $9.85 billion to expand the prisons--a venture which has already driven several states to the brink of bankruptcy--will run out in six years, thus leaving states on their own to cover the costs of maintaining the increased prison population. Ten years ago, California spent 14 per cent of its state budget on higher education and 4 per cent on prisons. Today, both figures stand at 9 per cent. This shift in priorities has had a devastating impact on the state. Corrections spending is the second-fastest-increasing budget item in all states, trailing only Medicaid. Yet there appears to be no relationship between incarceration rates and crime rates.

Thanks to the same kind of short-sightedness evident in the crime bill, four times more people are in prison today than twenty years ago, and Americans don't feel any safer.

The immeasurably wasteful and idiotic war on drugs has contributed substantially to this problem. The number of drug arrests skyrocketed starting in the late 1980s. The Atlantic Monthly reported recently that one out of every six inmates in the Federal prison system has been incarcerated primarily for a marijuana offense.

According to researchers at the Brooking Institution, if we keep going at the current rate, by the year 2054 we will have incarcerated one-half of the population of the United States.

[paragraph] $13.45 billion for state, local, and Federal police, including the much-touted community policing programs, promises to have little effect on how communities deal with crime. Despite all the rhetoric about positive change in community police work, there is no single, accepted definition of "community policing." Money allocated to local police forces will simply help each jurisdiction add more police to do what police there do already. Furthermore, since most of the money is in the form of matching funds and the Federal share of these funds runs out after six years, many cities may not take the Government up on its offer at all.

[paragraph] The creation of more than fifty new Federal death-penalty crimes is more evidence of the sheer hypocrisy and phoniness of the bill. While expanding the death penalty is in itself morally repugnant, this provision will have an impact only on those few territories where the U.S. Government, rather than any state government, holds sway. Car-jacking slayings and drive-by shootings will be covered, but then they already were, since murder is illegal whether or not a car is involved. Executing major drug traffickers is an innovation that will help no one.

[paragraph] Tossing third-time violent and drug felons in prison for life mimics popular new "three-strikes" measures that are already cramming the prisons in many states. These blanket mandatory-sentencing laws are a disaster for such individuals as Charles Bentley, a homeless man with two previous felony convictions who was sentenced under California's three-strikes law after stealing fifty cents from another homeless person.

The more constructive provisions of the crime bill are pitifully inadequate:

[paragraph] A ban on nineteen types of assault-style firearms, while sensible in itself, is attached to an exemption clause for 650 other firearms.