The ambivalence of Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime law

BILL CLINTON wants you to know three things about his He is proud of it, he is sorry about it, and it wasn’t his fault. In any case, he says, his wife had nothing to do with it.

The former president’s position Control and Law Enforcement Act is newly relevant now that Hillary Clinton, who enthusiastically sup - ning for president as a criminal justice reformer. Depending on your sympathies, her husband’s take is either nuanced or incoherent.

Speaking in Philadelphia last week, Bill Clinton was repeatedly interrupted by Black Lives Matter protesters who blame him for contributing to the “mass incarceration” he and his wife now decry. He defended the crime bill as an appropriate response to violence that disproportionately hurt African Americans.

“Because of that law,” Clinton [and] a 33-year low in the murder rate.” While it’s true that violent crime began a long decline in the - and there is little evidence that the elements of the bill Clinton touts played an important role in the continuation of that downward trend.

Last week, for example, Clinton fact checker Glenn Kessler gave Clinton’s claims about that program’s impact “three Pinocchios,” saying it “was not the primary or even secondary factor in the dramatic re

What about the crime law’s ban on so-called assault weapons, which commissioned by the Justice Department concluded that “we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence.”

Clinton also mentioned the background checks for people licensed dealers. According to research by Duke University criminologist Philip Cook, a gun control supporter, that requirement “made no discernible difference” in gun homicide rates.

Clinton did not cite incarceration as a factor in falling crime, because he was bending over backward to distance himself from that bill’s punitive provisions, which included new mandatory minimum sentences and subsidies for state prison construction that were contingent on passage of “truth in sentencing” laws (which limit or abolish parole), were forced on him by Republicans.

According to Clinton, Vice President Joseph Biden, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the crime bill’s main sponsor, told him, “You can’t pass this bill, and the Republicans will kill it, if you don’t lady, Hillary Clinton cited tougher sentencing rules as one of the bill’s main advantages, and after it passed, the administration bragged about making prison terms longer.

It seems likely that increased imprisonment did help reduce crime, if only by incapacitating people inclined to commit it. But the effectiveness of that policy depends on locking up the right people for the right amount of time, and Clinton now concedes that the sentences he supported as president went too far.

“I signed a bill that made the problem worse, and I want to admit it,” he said during another visit to there were longer sentences, and most of these people are in prison under state law, but the federal law set a trend. And that was overdone; we were wrong about that.”

Clinton was in a less apologetic mood last week. Perhaps he was tired of overheated criticism that exaggerates his role in the explosive growth of the US prison population, a trend that began a occurred mainly at the state level. But if Clinton wants less blame, he should stop taking so much credit.