Since we're going to be arguing about it for a while, let us stipulate that when Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime and Control Act in 1994 he did not single-handedly launch the destructive effects of mass incarceration and racial disparity in our legal system. What he did was put a conservative Democratic gloss on a process that began in the modern era with Lyndon Johnson's Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act in 1968, and that accelerated with Ronald Reagan's Omnibus Crime Bill in 1984. But that very fact clinches the case that the current critics of the 1994 bill—which Clinton himself has admitted was a mistake—are trying to make against it. It was one piece of a decades-old bipartisan "anti-crime" crusade that turned into an unthinking beast in our democracy, the damage from which fell most harshly on racial minorities, especially African Americans. It doesn't lessen the culpability of Clinton's bill that it was part of a 30-year effort that came to what are now seen as inevitably destructive conclusions. It amplifies it.

Let us also stipulate, because we are not five years old, that there were more than a few triangulated political motives for Clinton's having signed the bill. After all, his administration was a triumph for the politics of the Democratic Leadership Council, the famously business-friendly conservative Democratic operation that rose to power first as an opposition force to the New Deal liberalism of people like George McGovern and Walter Mondale, and then evolved into an opposition force to the new progressive coalition that had lined up behind Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988. (Jackson memorably once cracked that DLC stood for "Democrats for the Leisure Class.") By the time Clinton came around to run for president, the DLC was dedicated to protecting the victories it had won over McGovern and Mondale against the forces within the party that Jackson's campaigns had empowered. Clinton, because he once was a brilliant politician, managed to keep both of these horses in harness, but there was no doubt where his policy heart lay—hence, the crime bill, which did not launch the era of mass incarceration, but added to it immeasurably.

Now that it has become an issue in the campaign, Bill Clinton, in his capacity as one of his wife's worst surrogates, has abandoned his expressions of regret regarding the bill and is defending it with no little vehemence. One of his primary arguments is that the Congressional Black Caucus supported the bill in 1994, as did many leaders and ordinary citizens in the African American community. That was the nub of the gist in his tirade against some Black Lives Matter protestors last week. However, an op-ed in The New York Times today suggests strongly that the evidence supporting this argument is historically threadbare.

There's no question that by the early 1990s, blacks wanted an immediate response to the crime, violence and drug markets in their communities. But even at the time, many were asking for something different from the crime bill. Calls for tough sentencing and police protection were paired with calls for full employment, quality education and drug treatment, and criticism of police brutality. It's not just that those demands were ignored completely. It's that some elements were elevated and others were diminished—what we call selective hearing. Policy makers pointed to black support for greater punishment and surveillance, without recognizing accompanying demands to redirect power and economic resources to low-income minority communities. When blacks ask for better policing, legislators tend to hear more instead.

This is a deeply important point, with some fairly noxious racial undercurrents to it. Basic to what the authors are saying is that, too often, what drives law-enforcement policy in this country is a feeling that African Americans have a basic need to be controlled by white authority, rather than protected by it. (Those People just can't control themselves.) This is what's behind what the authors here call "selective hearing," a phenomenon they trace back to the tailored misuse by white political leaders of the work of people like Ida B. Wells and W.E.B DuBois. (And, I would argue, it's what's behind one of the great crimes against rhetoric—the reduction of Dr. King's speech on the National Mall to one clause about the content of people's characters.) The authors also trace the 1994 crime bill back to its roots in 1968, when the War of Poverty was crumbling and the cities were aflame.

During the 1960s, blacks argued for full socioeconomic inclusion and an end to discriminatory policing, which they argued was a root cause of that decade's urban unrest. Instead, they got militarized police forces and riot tanks in the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. In the ashes of the war on poverty, the trend accelerated. The penal system ballooned, while social supports directed toward the poorest and most vulnerable declined precipitously. Black leaders argued for full employment in the press and on the floor of Congress, urged vetoes of draconian legislation and drafted their own bills to support community-led anti-crime programs—and all to little avail.

This, inevitably, led to a 1994 bill that was bargained into being more punitive than it had to be—just as Clinton's welfare-reform bill was bargained into being more harsh than it had to be, and his financial regulatory regime was bargained into being more lenient than it had to be.

While supporting the idea of addressing crime, members of the Congressional Black Caucus criticized the bill itself and introduced an alternative bill that included investments in prevention and alternatives to incarceration, devoted $2 billion more to drug treatment and $3 billion more to early intervention programs. The caucus also put forward the Racial Justice Act, which would have made it possible to use statistical evidence of racial bias to challenge death sentences. Given the history of selective hearing, what followed was no surprise. Black support for anti-crime legislation was highlighted, while black criticism of the specific legislation was tuned out. The caucus threatened to stall the bill, but lawmakers scrapped the Racial Justice Act when Republicans promised to filibuster any legislation that adopted its measures. In final negotiations, Democratic leadership yielded to Republicans demanding that prevention (or "welfare for criminals" as one called it) be sliced in exchange for their votes. Senator Robert Dole insisted that the focus be "on cutting pork, not on cutting prisons or police." The compromise eliminated $2.5 billion in social spending and only $800 million in prison expenditures.

The results were sad and predictable: prison spending skyrocketed, and so did the demand to fill those new cells with new inmates. Some of the African American members of Congress whose support Bill Clinton is using now to justify what he did back then saw it all coming. The authors here unearth a classic quote from Rep. Bobby Scott of North Carolina:

"You wouldn't ask an opponent of abortion to look at a bill with the greatest expansion of abortion in the history of the United States, and argue that he ought to vote for it because it's got some highway funding in it."

To paraphrase the late Senator Daniel Moynihan, the Clintons are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own history. There seems little question that President Bill Clinton had good intentions, but also that he bargained those away in an attempt to produce a bill aimed mostly at quieting the fears of white suburban Democrats. They were, after all, his base.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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