Thirty years ago, President Bill Clinton signed what amounted to the biggest federal intervention in crime and justice in a generation. The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act paid to put more cops on the streets, imposed tougher sentences and provided federal funds to build prisons. In the years since, many of its architects have come to consider it a terrible mistake. The conversation about public safety has changed in the past few decades, said Nick Turner, who leads the Vera Institute of Justice. “Crime is lower. Perceptions of crime are lower. People are more skeptical of tough-on-crime responses,” Turner said, reports NPR. Violent crime still features in plenty of political ads. In last week’s presidential debate, former President Trump highlighted offenses that he alleged had been committed by immigrants.
The excesses of the justice system also got a mention, when Vice President Harris mentioned the Central Park Five, who were convicted, then later exonerated, for the brutal assault of a jogger in New York City in 1989. They also took the stage during the Democratic National Convention this summer. Cully Stimson of the Heritage Foundation noted that reported crime peaked in the early 1990s and then fell dramatically for the next few decades. “The carrot-and-stick approach worked,” Stimson said. “That’s what drove down crime rates.” The carrot is creating alternatives to incarceration like drug courts and veterans’ courts, and funding violence prevention programs. The stick, he says, is accountability. “And accountable does not mean jail,” he said. “In most instances most offenders don’t go to jail, nor should they go to jail, but they need to be held accountable.” Trump, in 2018, signed the First Step Act, a law that allowed thousands of people in prison to leave earlier than expected. States made even bigger changes to their justice systems in that era. "When I tell my students the United States no longer has the highest incarceration rate in the world, they’re usually shocked,” said Udi Ofer, a professor at Princeton University.
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