In a month that marks 30 years since the passage of the 1994 crime bill, last week’s debate was a stark reminder that we must move forward in our language and policies on crime and punishment. As we look to the future, let reform be our legacy, not mass incarceration.

September 19, 2024

Friends,

Much was said about crime, safety, and punishment during last week’s debate and on the campaign trail in its wake. Unfortunately, from former President Trump, much of it reflected a fear-mongering, anti-immigrant playbook straight from the 1990s.

Coincidentally, September marks the 30th anniversary of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994–more commonly known as the Crime Bill. While the trajectory of mass incarceration began well before the Crime Bill, the landmark federal legislation has come to act as a cultural stand-in for an era of approaches to safety and justice that we now understand as ineffective and out-of-date.

Americans learned the lessons of “tough-on-crime” politics the hard way. We are very much still living with the consequences of “super-predators,” “delinquents,” “aliens” and other degrading monikers that peppered debate stages and campaign commercials and which went on to inspire a movement of very real and harmful policymaking in the 1990s and beyond. Polling shows that voters–especially Black voters, young voters, and Latino voters–are sick of politicians playing politics with these issues and, instead, want to see real solutions on safety and justice.

In this note, I want to add to the many voices setting the record straight on the lies about crime and immigrants that were said in the debate. And I want to reflect a bit on what’s changed in the past 30 years in terms of our understanding of the harms and limitations of mass incarceration and public support for reform–and the implications for this election.

Enough with fear-mongering on crime and immigration

Immigrants are not causing crime to increase in this country. No caveats, no nuance. The evidence on this one is unequivocal. Other countries are not safer than us because they are emptying their prisons and people are coming to the U.S. to commit crime (in the words of the Washington Post: poppycock). 

In fact, crime is going down in the U.S., to a remarkable degree–arguably in part because of historic investments in communities from the Biden-Harris administration. See our prior newsletter for more on this, as well as the new real-time crime index from AH Datalytics for some additional promising data on downward crime trends this year. That doesn’t mean we have the safety we need and deserve yet but we do know a lot about what could get us there and it’s not anti-immigrant fear-mongering. We need look no farther than Springfield, Ohio for confirmation on that: community security unraveling, dozens of bomb threats and ensuing evacuations, increased patrolling, and closed schools all after former President Trump lifted racist conspiracy theories about Haitian immigrants on the debate stage.

Immigrants do not commit more crime than people born in this country–on the contrary, immigration is associated with safer communities. Numerous studies show that immigrants–including people who are undocumented–are less likely to commit crimes and to be incarcerated.

The rhetoric we heard from former President Trump is, as Vice President Harris said, from a very old playbook intended to drum up political support by making people afraid of their neighbors. It leads to incredibly unpopular policies that separate families and depress economies.

We’ve learned a lot in 30 years

We’ve been conducting this experiment in mass incarceration for a long time–even longer than the 30 years since the 1994 Crime Bill. At this point we know a few things about where it leads, and it’s nowhere good.

A few lessons to move us forward, away from fear and lies:

Lesson #1: Mass incarceration makes us poorer.

Incarceration is one of the most expensive and least effective investments in public safety, costing taxpayers across the country $89 billion a year, and adding billions more in costs to families and communities across the country. From bail to legal fees, to supporting a loved one behind bars by paying for commissary, visits, and communication, incarceration and the criminal justice system strip wealth from families above and beyond what they pay in taxes.

People who have been incarcerated also pay for it, along with their families, for the rest of their lives in the form of depressed wages. People who have been in prison have their annual earnings reduced by more than 50% and earn nearly half a million dollars less over their lifetimes than they would have otherwise, perpetuating cycles of poverty particularly in Black and Latino communities. Mass incarceration also suppresses the wages of all low wage workers and makes it harder for workers to unionize.

Mass incarceration is a pocketbook issue. Safe and effective criminal justice reforms put money back in the pockets of families that need it most. When voters tell us that the cost of living is their number one concern, criminal justice reform is part of the solution.

Lesson #2: It doesn’t make us safer.

We’ve addressed this a bunch in past newsletters but we know that we can reduce incarceration and crime rates at the same time –we’ve been doing it! We know that the states with the lowest imprisonment rates also have lower crime rates and we know that second chances must be a part of any serious safety agenda. 

When we talk to voters about building safe communities, we owe it to them to anchor those promises in an evidence base that will actually get us there. Crime is not the most important issue for voters heading to the polls but it remains a motivator for many and especially for those groups most impacted by crime and violence like Black voters. 

Lesson #3: Most voters have been exposed in some way and it has shaped their politics. 

Beyond the significant kitchen table and community economic impacts, mass incarceration has many other serious, well-documented consequences. Consider this: incarceration reduces life expectancy for the person who was in prison and for their family members–reducing our overall national life expectancy by two years. People who have been incarcerated are nearly ten times more likely to be homeless, and people who are unhoused are more likely to be incarcerated, fueling an unhealthy cycle (that can be broken!). Entire families, and particularly kids, are shouldering the burden of mass incarceration.

Mass incarceration and its consequences are playing out in the lives of most Americans and most voters. 1 in 2 of us have had an immediate family member incarcerated. Nearly 1 in 3 of us have a criminal record. We aren’t all affected equally, of course: Black adults are 50% more likely than white adults to have had a family member incarcerated, and 1 in 3 Black men have a felony conviction. We have countless studies showing the harms of mass incarceration. But the point is that even without that academic evidence, many, many voters have also experienced or witnessed some aspect of this damage personally and it informs their politics. 

People understand that mass incarceration is real, and that it isn’t healthy for our communities or our country. I’ve been looking at the polls on this a long time, and I was moved to see that in 2024 nearly 80% of all voters across parties support criminal justice reform. Not only that–they are more likely to vote for a candidate that supports reform.

Polling conducted by BSG on behalf of FWD.us, Feb. 2024

We’ve come so far. Let reform be our legacy

We’ve learned so much about mass incarceration and the promise of reform in the 30 years since the 1994 Crime Bill was passed. About how to combat old-fashioned fear-mongering and lies. About the popular, commonsense reforms that reduce recidivism, reunite families, get people back to work, and strengthen communities. And the Democratic presidential ticket has the receipts to show these reforms work.

We do not want to go back on criminal justice reform. And we don’t have to.

Zoë Towns

Executive Director, FWD.us