Twenty years ago this week, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. It put more cops on the streets, imposed tougher prison sentences, and increased funding for prisons. The thinking was that harsher prison sentences could act as a deterrent to violent crime.
But by the time the bill passed, the nation's violent crime rate had already begun its long-term downward slide. The new law was attempting to solve a problem that was already being solved.
What the law did do is help increase America's already-rising imprisonment rates — and, along with other laws from the tough-on-crime era, it did so in a way that punished minority groups much more than their white counterparts.
Jeremy Travis, president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, attended the bill's signing and later joined Clinton's Department of Justice. Since then, he's acknowledged the Clinton administration made some serious errors.
"We now know with the fullness of time that we made some terrible mistakes," Travis told NPR. "And those mistakes were to ramp up the use of prison. And that big mistake is the one that we now, 20 years later, come to grips with. We have to look in the mirror and say, 'look what we have done.'"
[For more of this story, written by German Lopez, go to http://www.vox.com/2014/9/12/6...-racism-war-on-drugs]
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