Remembering what Urban Crime was like in the '90's

[kennetha]

Community activists, social workers and psychologists who have studied the effects on young people of living amid violence say children who plan their own funerals are showing that they do not expect to live long.

"It's strange to hear young kids talking about dying, but that goes along with the times," said Sharon Brooks, 32, an instructor at the Boys and Girls Club. "For them to come tell you someone was murdered the night before is just like regular conversation."

William W. Johnson, a former police officer who works with youths in the District, said death is almost a daily reality for some.

"It's happening around them. . . . These kids come home to dope, guns and killing. We're living in a war zone," Johnson said. "They actually believe they are not going to be around. If you look at the circumstances and the facts, they have enough to think that way."


GETTING READY TO DIE YOUNG

[Viva_La_Revolution]

1. so we filled for profit prisons with those young black men living in those neighborhoods

See? All better

[kennetha]

3. The history is a lot more complicated than that

Sure the crime bill had some bad and unforeseen consequences. it had some good ones too.

Governing is hard. really hard.

[NWCorona]

5. Unforeseen? No people seen it coming

[beedle]

14. Unforeseen?

Mr. Speaker, it is my firm belief that clearly, there are some people in our society who are horribly violent, who are deeply sick and sociopathic, and clearly these people must be put behind bars in order to protect society from them. But it is also my view that through the neglect of our Government and through a grossly irrational set of priorities, we are dooming tens of millions of young people to a future of bitterness, misery, hopelessness, drugs, crime, and violence. And Mr. Speaker, all the jails in the world, and we already imprison more people per capita than any other country, and all of the executions in the world, will not make that situation right. We can either educate or electrocute. We can create meaningful jobs, rebuilding our society, or we can build more jails. Mr. Speaker, let us create a society of hope and compassion, not one of hate and vengeance.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/8/8/1410122/-Senator-Sanders-remarks-on-1994-Crime-Bill

But I guess private prison cells don't fill themselves.

[Cheese Sandwich]

2. Hide your kids Hide your wife. Super-predators coming to get you. Quick lock everyone up.

Need more cops. Need more prisons.

[Ash_F]

4. It's been over 20 years since that article

I am not dismissing it, but it is time for reflection.

Please watch this

[Joe the Revelator]

6. Is this what we're doing now?

[Armstead]

7. My, my....Now it's role reversal time because Bill got into a dustup with AA protestors

[Loudestlib]

8. Crime rates have dropped worldwide.

That's worldwide. Other countries didn't lock up 1 out of every 3 black men and rates still went down.

[kennetha]

10. that's not the fault of the 1994 Crime Bill

the federal government is a tiny, tiny part of our excess incarceration problem, and it didn't start in the '90s.

[Loudestlib]

16. .

The Act authorized the initiation of "boot camps" for delinquent minors and allocated a substantial amount of money to build new prisons.

Fifty new federal offenses were added, including provisions making membership in gangs a crime. Some argued[citation needed] that these provisions violated the guarantee of freedom of association in the Bill of Rights. The Act did incorporate elements of H.R. 50 "Federal Bureau of Investigation First Amendment Protection Act of 1993" (into §2339A (c)) to prohibit investigations based purely on protected First Amendment activity, but this was effectively removed in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.[10]

The Act also generally prohibits individuals who have been convicted of a felony involving breach of trust from working in the business of insurance, unless they have received written consent from state regulators.

The Act also made drug testing mandatory for those serving on federal supervised release.

The Act requires the United States Department of Justice to issue an annual report on “the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.” Such reports have not been issued, however.[11]

The Act included a "Three Strikes, You're Out" provision addressing repeat offenders.[12]
Legacy

The increase in incarceration led to prison overcrowding. The legal system relied on plea bargains to minimize the increased case load.[13] Jerry Brown and Bill Clinton later regretted the portions of the measure that led to increased prison population, e.g. the Three Strikes provision.[12][14] Nevertheless, it has been acknowledged that the COPS Office had at least a modest impact in starting a long period of reduction in crime;[9] the primary reasons for this reduction remain a mystery.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Crime_Control_and_Law_Enforcement_Act

[CBHagman]

9. There are still a number of us on DU who remember the higher crime rates of the '70s, '80s, and '90s

Of late I have seen an effort to rewrite history, with people failing to distinguish between legitimate concerns about sentencing laws or misuse of force and attempts to address the senselessly brutal violence communities faced in the past decades and still face today. On DU there's a fair amount of responding to headlines, without context, without facts, without a grasp of the issues, and definitely without either nuance or intellectual curiosity, or the ability to separate issues.

[beedle]

17. And enacting bullshit federal crime bills helps exactly how?

No, it's not complicated .... it's very simple:

1 - recognize there is a problem with the SYSTEM --- Stop laying it all on the poor communities.
2 - don't just sit there making excuses for obviously dumb past policies (that smart people saw coming) or how complicated it is.
3 - We know some things don't work ... private prisons, the war on drugs, racial profiling of whole communities, military style policing, so IMMEDIATELY take VERY STRONG steps to eliminate those obvious problems.
4 - Not all problems are "the States problems", you can work on them as you can, but do the Federal level pieces NOW.
5 - If congress and/or senate trys to get in the way, stand up and face them and ask the people to be relentless against the politicians who are stopping progress, and use your bully pulpit to be with the people, not to do "negotiations" that start on the side of the line that just makes things worst, or does absolutely nothing to solve the problem.
6 - Stop worry about legacy, if you try, try hard, even to the point of being criticized and hated for being 'rude' and 'prickish', and succeed, you will have a legacy based on conviction rather than what you can "compromise one" ... if you fail, well at least you have your integrity and the knowledge you tried for something you believe it.

[Lucinda]

19. + a million

[Bread and Circus]

11. For profit prisons and mass incarceration was not the answer. That should be obvious, even to you.

[Bonobo]

12. And now the US has more black people incarcerated than the slave population of the US at its peak.

Congratu-fucking-lations.

[TM99]

13. We remember. Many of us were there

working in urban environments.

And you are flat out wrong about the reality of the 1990's crime, the myth of the superpredator, and the Clinton crime bill.

The New York Times reported this week on the "superpredator" myth, which 20 years ago led nearly every state in the country to expand laws that removed children from juvenile courts and exposed them to adult sentences, including life without parole.

A documentary by Retro Report, The Superpredator Scare, tells the story of how influential criminologists in the 1990s issued predictions of a coming wave of "superpredators": "radically impulsive, brutally remorseless" "elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches" and "have absolutely no respect for human life." Much of this frightening imagery was racially coded.

In 1995, John DiIulio, a professor at Princeton who coined the term "superpredator," predicted that the number of juveniles in custody would increase three-fold in the coming years and that, by 2010, there would be "an estimated 270,000 more young predators on the streets than in 1990." Criminologist James Fox joined in the rhetoric, saying publicly, "Unless we act today, we're going to have a bloodbath when these kids grow up."

The criminologists' amicus brief summarized extensive research data demonstrating that "the predictions by the proponents of the juvenile superpredator myth" were wrong. "Yet," it concluded, "the superpredator myth contributed to the dismantling of transfer restrictions, the lowering of the minimum age for adult prosecution of children, and it threw thousands of children into an ill-suited and excessive punishment regime." The research shows that these new laws "had no material effect on the subsequent decrease in crime rates," and yet almost all of these laws remain on the books. And while the Supreme Court in Miller struck down mandatory life-without-parole sentences for children, thousands of kids remain sentenced to die in prison as states fight retroactive application of the decision to sentences imposed during the height of the superpredator panic.

http://eji.org/node/893

Read that bolded sentence again and again. Scientific research shows that all of those new laws to deal with the urban crime caused by 'superpredator' minority youth in gangs HAD NO MATERIAL EFFECT ON THE SUBSEQUENT DECREASE IN CRIME RATES. None. Period.

Furthermore...

The myth of the superpredator helped spawn a generation of misguided laws that treated young people as adults, despite evidence that doing so actually increases recidivism. Most of these laws remain in effect. The Supreme Court has rightly begun to dismantle their constitutional foundations, but some states are determined to act as if it were always 1995.

That evidence? Right here --https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/220595.pdf

I know it is a long boring actual psychological research bulletin, and it lays out in detail why these misguided law increased recidivism, did not decrease crime, increased mass incarceration of predominantly minority youth, and were supported by racists like the Clintons who pushed for the Draconian crime bill, much of which is still in effect today.

Articles like the one you are pushing tonight were written to support passage of these laws. They were written to support the superpredator myth. Honestly this is little different than the Satanic panic of the 1980's were legitimate news sources pushed article after article about supposed Satanic ritual abuse in day cares across America. The same kind of social damage done then was done in the 1990's, and then it was done to AA's and Latino's.

[beedle]

21. Absolutely

+2,193,798 one for every prisoner in US prisons (yes, even the heinously guilty ones .. as it is impossible for them to compare to the heinously evil system that put them there)

[jfern]

15. Banning leaded gas is what actually lowered the crime

[winter is coming]

18. I remember what urban crime was like in the 90s.

I thought the super predator remark was appalling and racist when it was first made, and nothing since then has changed my opinion of it.

[PowerToThePeople]

20. Was Bill protecting the Reagan administration's crimes?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/10/gary-webb-dark-alliance_n_5961748.html

Key Figures In CIA-Crack Cocaine Scandal Begin To Come Forward

...

More than 18 years have passed since Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with his “Dark Alliance” newspaper series investigating the connections between the CIA, a crack cocaine explosion in the predominantly African-American neighborhoods of South Los Angeles, and the Nicaraguan Contra fighters — scandalous implications that outraged LA’s black community, severely damaged the intelligence agency’s reputation and launched a number of federal investigations.

It did not end well for Webb, however. Major media, led by The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, worked to discredit his story. Under intense pressure, Webb’s top editor abandoned him. Webb was drummed out of journalism. One LA Times reporter recently apologized for his leading role in the assault on Webb, but it came too late. Webb died in 2004 from an apparent suicide. Obituaries referred to his investigation as “discredited.”

(much more good stuff @ link)

...

[beedle]

22. Ehrlichman admitted it started with Nixon

but I would assume that the 'plan' followed through the rest of the right wing administrations ... including the Clintons given their support for such an ugly anti-black crime bill.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/

[PowerToThePeople]

23. I remember reading that history

The drug war is not something I follow much, but it appears to be a major concern. A war against American citizens by TPTB.

Good post.