For an alternate point of view, see: “Counterpoint: The 1994 Crime Bill’s Legacy–Thirty Years of Failure”
By the early 1990s, the United States had experienced dramatic and unprecedented surges in crime, with the violent crime rate up 470 percent from 1961 and the murder rate up 92 percent from that year.
Life in American cities was more dangerous than ever, and punishment was not fitting the crimes. While the median sentence for murder was 15 years, the median time served was only 5.5 years. The median sentence for rape was five years, but the median time served was a paltry three. Overall, violent criminals served, on average, 37 percent (2 years, 11 months) of their sentenced time. Forty-four percent of Americans said there was an area near where they lived that they would be afraid to walk alone at night.
In response to widespread pressure from law enforcement and residents, on September 13, 1994, former president Bill Clinton signed the bipartisan Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Commonly referred to as the 1994 Crime Bill, this omnibus package was the most serious federal effort to reduce violent crime in U.S. history. The bill injected billions into hiring police, created a grant program to encourage state adoption of Truth in Sentencing laws, added prison capacity, and criminalized gang membership — among other provisions.
Support for the bill was considerably higher among Black Americans (58 percent) than among White Americans (49 percent) — likely because Black Americans bore the brunt of violent crime victimization and homicide then and now.
After passage, violent crime and homicide rates ticked downward for the next two decades. The results were particularly acute for Black violent crime victims. From 1993 to 2005, the rate of Black non-fatal violent victimization dropped by more than 50 percent. While it would be foolish to attribute all of this to the 1994 Crime Bill alone, there is good reason to believe specific policies were influential.
Economist Steven Levitt completed the most comprehensive analysis of the crime decline that began in the mid-1990s and found four significant factors of impact. Two of them — the increased number of police on the streets and increased prison populations — can be directly tied to the 1994 Crime Bill.
Evaluations of the bill’s hiring program have found that the program increased the number of officers on the street and reduced crime. These results align with public safety research that has continuously demonstrated that more police means less crime. Analyses of police staffing levels and crime in Florida and New York City found increasing police levels reduced overall crime. Another recent study found each additional police officer prevents 0.1 homicides — an effect that’s twice as large for Black victims compared to White victims.
Harsher punishments and more incarceration likely contributed to the decline because incarceration has a significant incapacitation benefit. While in prison, criminal offenders cannot victimize the public. A review of existing literature by the Sacramento-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation found that any claims of prison being criminogenic cannot outweigh that incapacitation benefit. One analysis found that incapacitating one high-rate offender prevents, on average, 9.4 serious felonies. Two recent studies from the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that longer sentences reduced recidivism among released federal inmates.
The main criticism of these provisions is that they exacerbated “mass incarceration” — a genuinely meaningless term that sounds scary but conveys no information. While it is true that U.S. incarceration rates are higher than Western Europe’s, we are not substantially more punitive. What we do have is a much higher rate of gun crime, which necessitates longer prison sentences and more incarceration.
This isn’t to say the bill was perfect, and in the 30 years since it became law, we have found ways to be more targeted in policing and sentencing. Overall, though, the 1994 Crime Bill marked a significant policy accomplishment and helped usher in a 20-year decline in violent crime that yielded fewer victims and more capacity for human flourishing in neighborhoods previously held captive by violence.
