Black Incarceration Didn't "Explode" Under the 1994 Crime Bill

[Galraedia]

The LA Times reports today that when Bernie Sanders talks about racial issues, he tends to focus on black incarceration rates:

At campaign events, he labels a national embarrassment the rate at which America imprisons black men — a rate that exploded under the landmark crime bill signed by President Bill Clinton.

The Times presents this claim without evidence. It is, apparently, now in the same category as the sun rising in the east and cigarettes causing lung cancer. It just is.

Except that it isn't. We don't have formal historical records of incarceration rates by race, but there are plenty of good estimates. The National Academies of Science produced one as part of its recent report, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States, and you can see it on the right (it includes both state and federal prisoners). The incarceration rate for blacks is indeed a national scandal, but not one that was affected one way or the other by the 1994 crime bill. There were plenty of problems with that bill, and it's perfectly all right to loathe it. But it had almost no effect on mass incarceration in general, nor did it affect black incarceration rates more than slightly.

Source:http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/02/black-incarceration-didnt-explode-under-1994-crime-bill

[DefenseLawyer]

1. Your graph kind of misses the point.

Yes, the NUMBER of people incarcerated didn't go up dramatically (although it continued to go up), but the LENGTH of the sentences did. So over time more and more people came in to prison, but fewer and fewer were getting out. Thus leading to the massive level of incarceration we have now. Of course it wasn't just federal mandatory minimums in the crime bill, but huge investments in drug task forces at the state level and a parallel increase in prison sentences in the states as well. Obviously the ramping up of Nixon's war on drugs in general, which went into overdrive under Reagan and continued to expand under Bush and Clinton is far more to blame over all than just the crime bill.

[TM99]

3. Not to mention the fact

that teens are often now treated as adults and incarcerated as such.

[TM99]

2. Sloppy reporting with faulty conclusions.

They are attempting to say that 'after the passage' was but a year or so later. If you actually look at the arc of the curve and project out 5 years from its passage, you will see that it did rise dramatically. Crime, and violent crime, in general have dropped off yet mass incarceration of AA's stands still at the same levels as in the 1990's after peaking in the early 2000's.

People tend to neglect this fact, but here it is. All of the provisions of the Clinton crime bill are still in effect. None have been overturned, replaced, or lessened.