Council on Criminal Justice releases new papers on "Federal Sentencing Provisions of the 1994 Crime Bill"
I noted in this post this past summer the notable new group working toward criminal justice reform called the Council on Criminal Justice. In September, I flagged in this post that the Council on Criminal Justice had gotten started on a great new set of papers and resources taking a close look at the 1994 Crime Bill. The first two paper in the series, Overview and Reflections by Richard Rosenfeld and Impacts on Prison Populations by William Sabol and Thaddeus Johnson, both provided terrific perspectives and details on the import and impact of the 1994 Crime Bill.
I am now very pleased to report that the third paper in this series has been published under the title "Tough and Smart: Federal Sentencing Provisions of the 1994 Crime Bill." If you click through to the full paper, you can see that one of the reasons I am pleased to see it published is because I am its author. I was very honored to get a chance to work with the CCJ team on this project, and all the folks involved with CCJ were quite effectively invested in helping me work through the various complicated federal sentencing stories that emerged from the 1994 Crime Bill.
I recommend that interested persons read this piece in full, as there are lots of intricacies to this story that I was only able to partially capture in what is meant to be a short read. The start and end of the piece provides a hint of its essential points:
When President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (the Crime Bill), he called it the “toughest and smartest crime bill in our history.” Enhancing penalties across a wide range of offenses, the Crime Bill included many provisions that not only justified the “tough” label, but also fueled “get-tough” rhetoric and behavior by federal, state, and local officials nationwide. This well-known legacy, however, obscures what may be one of the most consequential sentencing provisions in this massive law — a “smart” sentencing section that has allowed tens of thousands of people convicted of drug crimes to avoid certain severe mandatory minimum terms enacted by Congress in the 1980s....
Reflecting the “tough-on-crime” attitudes of the times, some federal lawmakers criticized the Crime Bill as not tough enough despite its many punitive elements. Just weeks after passage of the landmark legislation, Republican lawmakers introduced the Contract with America, which included a promise to adopt a Taking Back Our Streets Act within the first 100 days of what signers hoped would be a Republican-held Congress. This pursuit of even harsher penalties and even more federal funding for prison construction than what was authorized in the Crime Bill was not surprising; in fact, such calls reflected much of the political and policy thinking of the time — on both sides of the aisle. In this era, talking tough was widely seen not only as essential to success at the ballot box, but also as the sound policy response to all crime concerns.
While the spirit and text of the Crime Bill focused on a tougher approach to crime and punishment, its sentencing provisions with among the greatest tangible impact were those that enabled people convicted of lower-level drug offenses to receive less severe sentences, and laid the foundation for future crack cocaine sentencing reforms. Despite that often overlooked reality, the Crime Bill fostered and reinforced tough-on-crime attitudes in Washington and among state and local criminal justice officials that contributed to historic growth in national prison populations.
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