1994 Crime Bill Turns 30: A Legacy of Controversy
Thirty years later, 1994’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (VCCLEA) is still criticized by progressive politicians for stoking mass incarceration in the United States. Others, like former Pres. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D)—who co-sponsored the bill as a Senator from Delaware—point to the sharp drop in crime rates that followed. Still others, like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), voted for the bill because of winning non-criminal provisions like the Violence Against Women Act, a now-expired 10-year assault weapons ban and firearm background checks.
VCCLEA pumped money to states to build a slew of new prisons, and incarceration rates rose to unprecedented levels. But the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative found that incarceration at all levels—state, local and federal—had been climbing rapidly before the bill and leveled off a few years later.
Federal prison stays also lengthened with the bill’s “truth in sentencing” (TIS) provision, which further encouraged states to pass analogous laws requiring prisoners to serve at least 85% of their sentences. But the Government Accountability Office was later able to identify only four states whose TIS laws were directly prompted by VCCLEA; in the rest, TIS momentum had already been building for several years.
Along with back-to-back epidemics of powder cocaine in the 1970s and crack cocaine in the 1980s came gang wars and drive-by shootings; the spike in urban crime juiced a mass exodus underway since the late 1940s from American cities to their suburbs. At its peak, the rate of violent crime passed 758 per 100,000 U.S. residents; even after a spike in crime after the COVID-19 pandemic, the rate in 2023 was just half of that 1991 peak.
As some social scientists point out, that peak came 18 years after the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). But even with the return of abortion restrictions after SCOTUS gutted Roe with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org., 597 U.S. 215 (2022), it’s unknown if another peak awaits in 2040.
Also unknown is whether Biden’s history with VCCLEA contributed to the collapse in his support as President in 2021, forcing him to withdraw his re-election bid three years later. Or whether the law’s long shadow helped doom the campaign of his replacement on the Democratic ticket, Vice-Pres. Kamala Harris (D), who built her career as a “tough-on-crime” California prosecutor in the 1990s. Hillary Clinton was merely First Lady when the law was signed by her husband, then-Pres. Bill Clinton (D). Yet she remained under its cloud 22 years later, when The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander cited VCCLEA to criticize Clinton’s unsuccessful 2016 Presidential campaign.
Kumar Rao, Senior Advocate for the Vera Institute of Justice, said that VCCLE’s premise was that prisons, policing and prosecution create safe communities—an approach he called “misguided” for “prioritize[ing] policing and incarceration over community-based solutions.” CourtTV legal analyst Sunny Slaughter agreed that VCCLEA’s more drastic provisions did more harm than good, “exacerbat[ing] generational trauma” and “impacting lives, families, and communities more deeply than the issues it sought to solve.”
Sources: Axios, Vox
As a digital subscriber to Prison Legal News, you can access full text and downloads for this and other premium content.
Already a subscriber? Login