Protests of 1994 Clinton law spur debate on crime, prisons

BY SETH GALINSKY

A sharp debate broke out when Bill Clinton was heckled April 7 by protesters in Philadelphia, who shouted slogans against an anti-crime bill and other anti-working-class laws signed by the former president and backed by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The hecklers, who have been part of Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality, carried signs that said, “Clinton crime bill destroyed our communities,” “Black youth are not superpredators” and “Welfare reform increased poverty.”

They were referring to the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which increased penalties for nonviolent drug offenses, included “three strikes and you’re out” mandatory sentencing for many federal crimes and funded 100,000 more street cops.

The law was backed by Republicans and Democrats alike, including two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus, many Black churches and then Rep. Bernie Sanders, now Hillary Clinton’s main opponent in the race for the Democratic Party nomination. Two years later President Clinton signed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, further undermining constitutional rights. That same year he signed the bipartisan Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, “ending welfare as we know it.”

“We needed to take these gangs on. They are often connected to big drug cartels,” Hillary Clinton said in a 1996 speech defending the 1994 law. “These are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kind of kids that are called ‘superpredators.’ No conscience, no empathy” and “we have to bring them to heel.” She now says that her choice of words was unfortunate. Actually, her words express the contempt the wealthy ruling class has toward all working people.

Gangs emulate capitalists

The gangs are often connected to the drug trade, but she misses the key point: the gangs emulate the capitalist class. The goal of the gang leaders is to get rich. And they don’t care how many people they step on to get there. They’re just like the propertied rulers, but with higher risks.

In Philadelphia Bill Clinton heatedly defended the law with arguments that still get resonance among working people — regardless of nationality — because they deal with the fallout of gang violence and other anti-social behavior in their daily lives.

“I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out on the street to murder other African-American children,” he said, wagging a finger at the hecklers. “You are defending the people who kill the people whose lives you say matter.” He said the law drastically cut murder rates.

The 1994 law strengthened existing trends that sent more working people of all nationalities to jail for longer terms, especially Blacks. It was just one piece of what led to the United States having the largest absolute numbers and percentage of prisoners in the world.

The U.S. prison population tripled from 300,000 to 1 million from 1974 to 1994 — before the law was passed. The prison population peaked in 2007 and has declined slightly since then.

The jump was caused by increased arrests, more discretion for prosecutors in what charges they could bring, and mandatory state sentencing laws adopted as capitalist politicians jumped on the bandwagon of the “fight against crime.” It’s no secret how it works. The prosecutor says, “Agree to a plea bargain, or I’ll throw the book at you and you’ll do triple the time.”

In the early 1960s about one-third of all criminal defendants insisted they were innocent and went to trial. Today only one out of 20 do so. And when a person is found guilty at trial, mandatory sentencing requires judges to impose longer terms.

Crime drop at what cost?

The combination of more people in prison for longer times and more police on the street using more aggressive measures, including stop and frisk, did help lower crime rates. But at what cost?

Wouldn’t a military dictatorship that suspends all constitutional rights and shoots people down in the street without the pretense of a trial also “bring down crime?” How about chopping off the hands of alleged thieves? Or worse?

Class-conscious workers oppose mandatory sentences, three-strikes- and-you’re-out laws, stop and frisk, solitary confinement, the death penalty.

Through fighting against these measures and joining other social struggles, working people will learn that “the purpose of the cops is to keep workers in line, to make an example of you if you come from the wrong class — and more so if you also happen to be the wrong color or the wrong nationality,” Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, says in the book Capitalism’s World Disorder. That is true for the entire “justice system,” from the courts to the prisons, under the dictatorship of the capitalist class — it can’t be reformed. It must be replaced.

When working people in the millions engage in struggle in the street and on the picket line, we begin to replace the me-first and look-out-for-number-one mentality of capitalism — the moral values of the gangs and capitalist exploiters alike — with solidarity captured by the union slogan: “an injury to one is an injury to all.”

Those are the moral values that became common through the Cuban Revolution, in the course of overthrowing the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and afterward. “When people talk about the achievements of the revolution,” Cuban revolutionary Gerardo Hernández notes, “hardly anything is ever mentioned about the tranquility of our everyday life … the fact that a child can play until dawn on a street corner near his home and nothing will happen to him.”

That is the result of a society based on human solidarity.

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