Brennan Center: Incarceration quadrupled from 1970 to 1994. It doubled from 1994 to 2009.

[highplainsdem]

Brennan Center article on the 1994 crime bill. This article was published in 2016, when the bill was brought up as part of THAT presidential campaign.

I want to post these stats here because it puts some perspective on the debate over how much the 1994 bill contributed to the increase in mass incarceration.

I'm not very good at stats, but if the rate of incarceration had quadrupled from 1970 to 1994, then if that rate had held steady, I think it would have been expected to double again by 2006. So if it took till 2009 to double, then the rate had in fact slowed a bit.

I'm not defending the most harmful aspects of the crime bill. It did not succeed in what it hoped to do.

But if these figures from the Brennan Center are correct, then it actually didn't speed up the rate at which mass incarceration was increasing, which had already been bad for decades.

https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/complex-history-controversial-1994-crime-bill

When Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders take the stage Thursday night in Brooklyn, the debate moderators will almost certainly ask them about a 22-year-old crime law. The issue is back in the news after the 1994 crime bill came up at a Hillary Clinton campaign rally last week.

Since then, much has been said about the legislation’s effect on crime and mass incarceration. Some argue the measure, officially called the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, led to a drop in crime. Others vehemently contend it did not. Questions abound about its impact on mass incarceration.

-snip-

Then there’s the bad: Although incarceration was already rising steadily before the crime bill, several of its provisions helped increase incarceration even further. Nevertheless, this increase had little impact on America’s subsequent drop in crime.

From 1970 to 1994, the rate of imprisonment exploded 400 percent, to 387 per 100,000 people. From 1994 to 2009, imprisonment continued to rise, doubling.

The crime bill contributed to this increase in incarceration. First, it banned 19 types of semiautomatic assault weapons, authorized the death penalty for dozens of existing and new federal crimes, and instituted a federal “three strikes and you’re out” provision.

But those facets were far less pernicious than how the crime bill influenced states to increase their prison rolls. The bill granted states $12.5 billion to build prisons if they passed “truth-in-sentencing” (TIS) laws, which required inmates to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences.

A 2002 Urban Institute study found that between 1995 and 1999, nine states adopted TIS laws for the first time, and another 21 states changed their TIS laws to comply with the crime bill’s requirements and then apply for funding. By 1999, a total of 42 states had such laws on the books, sustaining an increase in imprisonment.

The crime bill, however, was just the most high-profile legislation to increase the number of people behind bars. On their own, states passed three-strikes laws, enacted mandatory minimums, eliminated parole, and removed judicial discretion in sentencing. By dangling bonus dollars, the crime bill encouraged states to remain on their tough-on-crime course.

The bill itself seems to have been part of a trend in legislation.

[highplainsdem]

1. Kicking because this is relevant to any discussion of the 1994 crime bill.

[Mr.Bill]

2. What I saw in my state, California, for the last few decades

is if a Democrat did not vote for things like three strikes, mandatory sentencing, bigger budget for prisons, etc., the republican opposition would accuse them of being soft on crime, coddling criminals, putting criminals rights above victims, etc. This was a republican agenda in my state and it worked.

[highplainsdem]

3. ALEC was behind a lot of that. See reply 107 in this thread I posted back in 2011,

about the legislation ALEC was pushing in state legislatures.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x591230

The link I posted in that reply no longer works, but the excerpt refers to an ALEC task force:

Prominent among ALEC's corporate backers are several major stakeholders in prison privatization, including Corrections Corporation of America (CCA); Wackenhut Corrections; and Sodexho Marriott Services, a subsidiary of French multinational Sodexho Alliance, which until last year was a major stockholder in CCA, and now owns the former CCA prisons in the United Kingdom and Australia. CCA, the largest private prison corporation in the U.S., made the President’s List for contributions to ALEC’s 1999 States & Nation Policy Summit. Sodexho Marriott and Wackenhut also sponsored the conference.

Representatives from the corporate sector co-chair the task forces that develop ALEC's model legislation. CCA has long held a co-chair position on the Criminal Justice Task Force, as has the National Association of Bail Insurance Companies. These corporate interests have helped make tough criminal justice legislation a specialty of ALEC. In its 1995 Model Legislation Scorecard the organization claimed, "The busiest Task Force was Criminal Justice, which had 199 bills introduced." The report of the Criminal Justice Task Force states: “The Criminal Justice Task Force is dedicated to developing model policies that reduce both violent and property crimes in our cities and neighborhoods in an efficient, fiscally conservative manner. ALEC's Truth-in-Sentencing Act and Three-Strikes-You're-Out Act have been the most effective bills supported by the Task Force. At least one of these model bills has been enacted in half of the states in the country. The Task Force continues to explore cost-effective methods for states to manage their criminal justice systems.”

ALEC operated under the media radar for a long time, as it brought GOP representatives to its conferences and sent them home with cookie-cutter bills to introduce in their states' legislatures.

[Mr.Bill]

4. In California

it was also strong lobbying by the correctional officers. I our lifetimes, prisons have gone from a necessary evil to a growing industry.

[crazytown]

5. "The crime bill contributed to this increase ... it banned 19 types of semiautomatics'

“The crime bill contributed to this increase in incarceration. First, it banned 19 types of semiautomatic assault weapons”

How did that contribute to mass incarceration?