The 1994 Crime Bill, What It Actually Did and Who Wrote It

There is a law in American history that everyone in politics has, at some point, been against. Ask a candidate about the 1994 crime bill today and watch the face. It is the expression of a man who has just been asked whether he left the oven on in 1994 and cannot remember.

Here is the funny part. In 1994 it was the sort of law that people fought to have their names on. It was sold as the toughest anti-crime measure in a generation, a president of one party signed it, a Senate committee chairman of the same party shaped it, plenty of members of the other party voted for it, and the nation, which had spent a decade watching violent crime climb, wanted something done. Thirty years later each side has spent considerable effort explaining that it was the other side's fault.

I would like to give you the record instead of the spin. You can then decide what to be against.

What the law was, and who signed it

The bill's formal name is the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. President Clinton signed it on September 13, 1994. Its principal Senate author and champion was Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who had worked on versions of a comprehensive federal crime bill for years. It was a Democratic-led bill in a Democratic Congress, and it passed with votes from both parties and lost votes from both parties.

That last point is the one the myths skip. The bill was not a Republican trick and it was not a Democratic ambush. At one stage in August 1994 it stalled in the House, when a procedural vote failed 225 to 210 on August 11, with objections centered on the assault weapons provisions and on spending for prevention programs. It was reworked, and the House passed it on August 21. The final version was a compromise that nobody entirely loved, which is to say, a normal law.

It was also huge. It ran to hundreds of pages and touched nearly every part of the justice system. I want to take the pieces in turn, because the way to understand a big law is to take it apart.

The pieces, one at a time

1. The COPS program and 100,000 officers. The law created the Community Oriented Policing Services program, run through the Department of Justice, and set a goal of funding 100,000 additional police officers around the country. The mechanism was federal grants to local departments to hire and to adopt community policing. Local policing, you will remember, is a state and local matter, so the Justice Department did not hire the officers. It offered money to the cities that did.
2. Truth-in-sentencing and prison grants. The law set up grants to states to build and expand prisons and correctional facilities, with a condition: to qualify for the main money, a state had to require violent offenders to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. The idea of "truth in sentencing" is that a sentence of ten years should mean something close to ten years, not three.
3. A federal three-strikes provision. The law required life imprisonment for a person convicted in federal court of a "serious violent felony" who had two or more prior convictions for serious violent felonies or certain drug offenses. Because most crime is prosecuted by the states, this provision applied to a small number of federal cases. Its main effect was symbolic, and its imitation by states was larger than its own reach.
4. Expanded federal death penalty. The law added about sixty federal offenses to the list of crimes that could carry a death sentence.
5. A federal assault weapons ban. The law banned the manufacture and sale of certain semi-automatic firearms and large-capacity magazines for ten years, and the ban expired in 2004 under its own sunset clause. The ban cost Democrats, it is widely said, some seats in the 1994 midterm election, in which Republicans won both chambers of Congress. That is a point about politics. The assault weapons argument, a distinct subject, is covered in the guns category of this blog.
6. The Violence Against Women Act. Title IV of the law was the Violence Against Women Act, a landmark federal law addressing domestic violence and sexual assault, creating grants for prevention, services and prosecution.
7. Prevention programs. The law also funded a menu of prevention efforts, including some that conservatives mocked and some that they later defended.
8. Other provisions. Among a long list of other items, the law barred prisoners from receiving federal Pell Grants for education, a provision that has since been the subject of reconsideration across party lines.

Look at that list and tell me whether it fits any slogan. It has more police, more prisons, longer time served, an assault weapons ban, a domestic violence law, and some social programs. It is a bipartisan sausage. A person who says "the crime bill caused mass incarceration" and a person who says "the crime bill saved the cities" are each describing a fraction of the thing.

The strongest case against the bill

Let me do the debater's thing and state the critic's best case in terms its defenders would accept.

The critic says: American incarceration climbed for two decades before 1994 and kept climbing after it. The bill's prison grants and truth-in-sentencing incentives pushed states toward longer terms. Three-strikes laws, in the states that copied them, sent people away for very long periods over relatively minor third offenses. The bill funded locking people up, and the people who were locked up were disproportionately poor and disproportionately Black. And the prevention money was small next to the prison money.

That is a case that deserves a serious answer, and parts of it are right. Three-strikes laws, particularly as some states wrote them, did produce harsh results. Truth-in-sentencing is a real policy with real costs. A person who thinks long sentences are overused, as many conservatives now do, has a legitimate point, and we make a version of it in Mandatory Minimums Divide Conservatives, and Both Sides Have a Point.

The answer, in four points

Now the reply, point by point.

1. The federal government does not run most prisons. The great bulk of prison and jail inmates in America are held by states and counties under state law. The 1994 act offered grants and set conditions, and some states took the money and the conditions. But criminal law, under our system, is mostly the business of the states, which is why the Tenth Amendment matters here. A state legislature that chose longer sentences chose them, and it is too easy to blame Washington for choices made in Sacramento, Austin or Albany.
2. The incarceration trend predates the law. Prison populations had been rising since the 1970s, in a long climb that tracked the rise of violent crime and the public's demand for a response. The trend continued after 1994, and then, many years later, it turned. Whatever role the bill played, it did not start the climb and it did not end it. The turn came after the law's incentives had run out and the states themselves revisited their policies, which is a further point against giving the 1994 law all the credit or all the blame.
3. The crime decline is real, and its causes are argued. Violent crime peaked in the early 1990s and fell for a long stretch after. Economists and criminologists have proposed many explanations: more police, more incarceration, a changing drug market, an aging population, and others, with the weights hotly disputed. Serious studies of the 1994 law's own contribution tend to find it modest at most. That should humble everybody. The friends of the bill who say it saved the cities are claiming too much. The enemies who say it wrecked them are claiming too much on the other side.
4. The police money is the part with the best evidence. Of everything in the bill, the hiring of officers is the piece where independent research is most supportive that it had an effect on crime. We go through that research in What Economists Found When They Counted Police Officers and Crimes. If you want a case for any part of the 1994 law, that is the strongest.

Two pieces that deserve a second look

Two items on that list are worth pausing on, because they show the law was not one ideology.

The first is the Violence Against Women Act. Before 1994 a woman beaten by a partner often found that the system treated the matter as a private quarrel. The law put federal money behind shelters, hotlines, trained prosecutors and police training, and it has been reauthorized more than once with support from both parties. A conservative can look at that and see the oldest function of government at work: protecting the person who cannot protect herself from the person who is hurting her. The Declaration says governments exist to secure rights, and the first right on its list is life. A law that takes a beating seriously is not an exotic liberal project.

The second is the bar on Pell Grants for prisoners. The argument for it was a plain matter of fairness to law-abiding families: why should an inmate receive a federal education subsidy that a working neighbor's child struggles to get? That is a fair question, and it was an easy vote in 1994. The argument against it, which many conservatives have since embraced, is that education behind bars is one of the better-documented ways to lower the chance that a person returns, and that a prisoner who leaves with a skill is a taxpayer instead of a repeat customer. Both arguments are about money and results. Neither is about whether crime is bad. That is how a mature debate over punishment should go, and it is a debate the 1994 law, for all its faults, made visible.

Why both parties ran away

The politics of the thing are funnier than the policy, so let me enjoy them for a paragraph.

When violent crime was at its height, voters of every kind wanted action, and the bill was a way to show it. When crime later fell, and the harms of long sentences became more visible, the bill turned from a trophy into an anchor. Candidates who had cheered it on began to describe it as a regrettable product of its time, a phrase that has done more work than any other in modern politics. The same men who once said it did not go far enough now say it went too far, and they say it with the straight face of someone who has recently discovered the date.

I do not say that to sneer. Changing your mind in light of evidence is a virtue. What bothers me is changing your mind and also insisting you were never there. A lot of people voted for this law, and the honest thing is to say: we thought this would help, some of it did, some of it did not, and here is what we would do differently.

And here is where conservatives should be honest too. The right was loudest about being tough on crime, and a number of the right's favorite tools, mandatory sentences and three-strikes laws chief among them, look less wise than they did. The same movement that cheered them now sponsors reforms to earned-time credits and sentencing, which we covered in How Earned Time Credits Work in Federal Prison, and Who Is Left Out. That is not a retreat from law and order. It is the right applying its own principle, that government should be accountable for what it spends and for the results it gets, to the prison system as well.

What the law shows about federalism

Here is the constitutionalist lesson, and I think it is the most useful one.

The 1994 law is a case study in how Washington moves the states without commanding them. The Constitution gives Congress a short list of enumerated powers, and general criminal law is not on it. What Congress can do is spend, and attach conditions to the spending. The crime law did exactly that: money for police, money for prisons, conditions for each. Some states said yes. The Tenth Amendment says that powers not delegated to the United States "are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." A grant program is an offer and not an order, but an offer that big, from a government that big, is hard to refuse. That is how the national government has shaped local policy for a century, and it is worth knowing how the lever works, because it applies to far more than crime.

If the federal government had never offered the money, state legislatures would still have had to answer to voters for their sentencing laws. And that is the final point on who wrote the bill. Congress wrote the law. The states wrote the sentences. The voters wrote the demand.

The case in brief

1. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act was signed on September 13, 1994, shaped by Senator Joe Biden, and passed with support and opposition in both parties.
2. It funded a goal of 100,000 officers through COPS, set up prison grants tied to truth-in-sentencing, created a federal three-strikes rule, banned certain assault weapons for ten years and included the Violence Against Women Act.
3. Incarceration was rising before the law and kept rising after it, and most prisoners are held under state law, so blaming or crediting one federal statute for the whole trend claims too much.
4. The research best supports the police hiring piece, and long mandatory sentences deserve the second look that many conservatives now give them.
5. The lasting lesson is federalism: Washington shaped local policy with conditional money, and the states and their voters decided what to do with it.

What you can do: read your own state's sentencing and truth-in-sentencing statute on its legislature's website, and ask your state legislator what the state would change if it were writing the law today.