By the mid-90s, both political parties had come to endorse arrest and incarceration as a primary tool of crime-fighting. This conclusion was reached not warily, but lustily. As a presidential candidate, Bill Clinton flew home to Arkansas to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally disabled, partially lobotomized black man who had murdered two people in 1981. No one can say Im soft on crime, Clinton would say later.
Dark predictions of rising crime did not bear out. Like the bestial blacks of the 19th century, super-predators proved to be the stuff of myth. This realization cannot be regarded strictly as a matter of hindsight. As the historian Naomi Murakawa has shown in her book, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, many Democrats knew exactly what they were doingplaying on fear for political gainand did it anyway. Voting on the AntiDrug Abuse Act of 1986, Nick Rahall II, a congressman from West Virginia, admitted that he had reservations about mandatory minimums but asked, How can you get caught voting against them?
In 1994, President Clinton signed a new crime bill, which offered grants to states that built prisons and cut back on parole. Clinton recently said that he regrets his pivotal role in driving up the countrys incarceration numbers. I signed a bill that made the problem worse, he told the NAACP in July. And I want to admit it. In justifying his actions of 20 years earlier, he pointed to the problems of gang warfare and of innocent bystanders shot down in the streets. Those were, and are, real problems. But even in trying to explain his policies, Clinton neglected to retract the assumption underlying themthat incarcerating large swaths of one population was a purely well-intended, logical, and nonracist response to crime. Even at the time of its passage, Democratsmuch like the Republican Nixon a quarter century earlierknew that the 1994 crime bill was actually about something more than that. Writing about the bill in 1993, Clintons aides Bruce Reed and Jose Cerda III urged the president to seize the issue at a time when public concern about crime is the highest it has been since Richard Nixon stole the issue from the Democrats in 1968.
