Inevitably, the 1994 crime bill came up at Thursday’s Democratic debate in Brooklyn. While Hillary Clinton did her best to make everyone remember that it was her husband who actually signed the bill into law, she can’t erase the fact that she supported it at the time. Nor can Sen. Bernie Sanders, who voted for the law, hide that by deflecting the questioning back to Clinton’s astoundingly racist 1996 defense of it.
It’s fair to note, of course, that it’s been 22 years since that bill was passed, and that it’s only human for opinions to change. It’s also worth noting that many people backed the 1994 law, including many black activists and politicians. Many people who voted for the bill did not foresee what it was going to do.
But the fact is that none of that matters. The law was passed. Violent crime dropped almost 30 percent from 1994 to 2000, while the rate of imprisonment skyrocketed. Judicial discretion in sentencing was reduced. Mandatory minimums were enacted. Now the U.S. has 570,000 more people in prison than the next country down the list — China, whose population is greater than ours by more than a billion. Whatever happened in 1994 — and there is no relevant difference between Clinton and Sanders on that issue — happened.
What matters is what can be done about the results of it now, and I highly doubt any candidate will provide a good answer to that. To a limited extent, pushing to reduce or eliminate mandatory minimums, jettison three-strike laws and fix the many systems that unjustly put people in prison every day will help alleviate some of the mass incarceration caused by the crime bill.
However, it will not fix the larger problem that will prevent reform: America has made an industry out of prison.
For-profit prisons are on the rise in America, and with them rises their influence in the legislature. Private prisons often have "lockup quotas," where states are required to stock the cells with prisoners — these quotas guarantee the profit of the corporation, at the expense of prisoners. In my home state of Virginia, privately managed prisons must be kept 95 to 100 percent full — which incentivizes the state to artificially pump up incarceration rates to meet the requirement. Shockingly, the three other states with that requirement are three of the states with the highest incarceration rates.
While it can doubtless be argued by the most die-hard advocates of the free market that this will work itself out, it is worth it to consider that the customers of the prison are the states, and they are unlikely to care about prisoner welfare as much as keeping costs down. The people being hurt by these rules are people who can’t jump ship to a better, more ethically run prison system.
Prisons have been serving, since the days of Reagan and Clinton, as job creators. As incarceration has gone through the roof, prisons have needed more employees — and states have needed more prisons. The rise of solitary confinement “supermax” facilities alone since 1994 has seen the U.S. sink hundreds of thousands more dollars and jobs into prison creation, staffing and maintenance. We are now home to more prisons and jails than colleges and universities. And in states where reduced sentencing for drug crimes and early releases have led to the release of many prisoners, communities that have built their economies around prisons are facing job loss and financial crisis.
In an economy where people are still shaking from a recent recession and fearful of a new one, it is not going to be politically expedient to actually cut these jobs. Not to mention that, on the federal level, prison corporations such as The GEO Group and the CCA are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying for laws and funding congressmen who will protect their interests. On the state level, they are spending millions.
And when private, state and federal prisons and jails are often controlled by completely different systems and laws, it’s difficult to pass sweeping reform. Obama’s ban on juvenile solitary confinement may have helped as few as 13 people nationwide because it applied only to federal prisons. Add to this fractured prison administration the money corporations are pouring into keeping the mass incarceration machine running, and you have a bona fide political dilemma.
To support or not to support prison reform? On the one hand, in the 22 years since the crime bill, and indeed the tough-on-crime stance of the era in which it was passed, millions of prisoners have fallen victim to the prison-industrial complex. We have jailed people who did not deserve the length or the severity of their sentence. Mass incarceration has ruined lives and broken up families, and if we want to be a country that claims to value justice, we need to stop locking people up for decades for nonviolent offenses.
On the other hand, to fix the prison problem, we’ll have to tackle the immense political power of the for-profit prison industry. We’ll have to take the hit of job loss to the gut. We’ll have to hurdle the state-federal-private divide of prison administration. It is absolutely worth it to begin righting the wrongs of the years since 1994, but it will by no means be easy.
Does Hillary have the political backbone to do that, even if it won’t be popular? Can we actually trust Bernie to bother to address a prison issue that does not involve jailing Wall Street bankers? It’s easy to squabble about who said what back in 1994, but it’s also pointless in this case. There was no real daylight between them then.
Instead, let me suggest a much more worthwhile discussion: Tell us how you’re actually going to stop America's mass incarceration machine from running on high recidivism and perpetual imprisonment.