There is no indication that running on a platform of “Vote For Me and Criminals Go Free” is a winning message, but the 2020 Democrats are nonetheless giving it their all.
California Sen. Kamala Harris is trying to pretend she was never state attorney general, doing weird things like prosecuting criminals and enforcing full sentence terms. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg is nearly on his knees for having once dared to say that “all lives matter.” New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker is a nervous wreck about answering for instituting “aggressive” policing as mayor of Newark. And former Vice President Joe Biden last month put out a “plan” that would undo virtually all of his 1994 crime bill that was largely responsible for the steep national decline in violent crime.
As the Washington Post put it last week, within the Democratic Party, “The old political imperative to be ‘tough on crime’ has given way to a broad consensus that the system is overly punitive, unfair to minorities and in desperate need of reform.”
That “broad consensus” is usually based on polls that say things like “75% of those surveyed support changing the 20 year mandatory minimum for a second drug offense to 15 years,” and “70% of those surveyed support changing mandatory life sentences for a third drug offense to 25 years.”
The “broad consensus” comes, of course, after more than two decades of a violent crime rate that steadily plummeted and, weirdly enough, coincided with a rise in the prison population.
The Democrats favorite thing to hate when talking crime is Biden’s 1994 bill, signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The legislation instituted harsher sentences for violent and drug-related crime, gave billions of federal dollars to states to build more prisons and hire more police. Biden is now in favor of zeroing out prison sentences for drug offenders, eliminating the death penalty, and emphasizing “crime prevention” over incarceration.
A decade before the bill was signed, the murder rate steadily climbed from 8 murders per 100,000 people to nearly 10. A decade after the bill was signed, the number was cut in half and it has trended downward ever since.
Critics of the law like to repeat the myth that violent crime was already falling before the bill. It wasn’t. Just as any long-term study will show a dip or spike in numbers, there was a year here and there before the crime bill’s passage that showed a slightly lower rate of violent deaths than a previous year. But from 1974 to 1994, the murder rate was fairly consistent at being around 9 per 100,000.
Some have marveled at the murder death rate having maintained its decline while incarceration rates “continued at a strong pace” as though it’s either a problem or a supernatural occurrence. (Unsolved mysteries: Why crime went down as criminals were locked away.)
When a person is sent to prison, it’s not for a single day. It’s usually at least a year. Within that year, guess what else happens. Other criminals are found and put away for sentences that are at least a year for them, too.
That’s math, and Democrats think there’s seriously something wrong with it. Oh, well. Enjoy the falling murder rate while it lasts.
