If President Trump’s base understood that he is talking like a weak-kneed milquetoast on crime, at least when compared to Joe Biden, then Trump would have no chance at reelection.
Yet that’s exactly what Trump is doing, even if he is acting more out of ignorance than weakness.
The problem isn’t that Trump helped broker, and then signed, a law that reduced prison sentences for nonviolent offenders while expanding efforts aimed at rehabilitating former prisoners. For the most part, that law is a good one.
Instead, the problem is that Trump is criticizing Biden for helping usher into law a 1994 crime bill while his campaign team asserts the 1994 law unwisely “led to mass incarceration.” The latter allegation is barely true, and only with caveats. More important, the law Trump castigates is one about which Biden and all the law’s supporters should boast, not apologize. The law played a large role in cutting the nation’s violent crime rate in half. If Trump thinks that’s a bad thing, he’s a woolly-headed liberal in a way that makes the former vice president look like a smart, tough-on-crime conservative.
This column explored that crime bill in some detail two weeks ago. It helped finance more police (a good thing), along with more prison construction in order to alleviate inmate overcrowding. And in two very well-aimed ways, it aimed to keep violent offenders, especially proven repeat offenders, behind bars rather than on the streets where they could terrorize innocent citizens.
Trump wrongly claimed that his new First Step Act “helped fix the bad 1994 Bill.” It did nothing of the sort. Not even close. Trump’s law reduced sentences for nonviolent offenders. The 1994 law was aimed at violent offenders. Trump’s law, thank goodness, did not reverse any key provisions from 1994 (although it did slightly weaken an automatic life sentence for serious repeat offenders to a 25-year minimum instead). To the extent that the 1994 law did increase incarceration, as per the claim from the Trump campaign, it directly imprisoned only heinous offenders, exactly those criminals we should all want to be imprisoned.
The 1994 law helped localities hire more police, and that too was a good thing. Even if alternative sentencing for low-level offenders is a wise idea, it still is tremendously important to have police on the beat to arrest and charge those petty criminals. It remains true that the “broken windows” theory of crime control, which calls for enforcement of low-level crimes so as to maintain order and community pride, has been a great weapon in making U.S. streets tremendously safer over the past 25 years.
More police officers patrolling against both vandalism and crimes of violence, combined with stiffer sentences for violent recidivists, have worked wonders for American communities. Rates of violent crime in the United States had risen from 158.1 per 100,000 people in 1961 to 758.2 per 100,000 in 1991. Now they are back down to 387.1 per 100,000.
As Trump’s own personal attorney Rudy Giuliani tweeted as recently as May 15, “The 1994 Crime Bill … helped me and the NYPD reduce murder from @ 1,900 a year to @ 500 and then under Mayor Bloomberg to @ 350. That’s over 20,000 lives saved.”
For Trump to attack that superbly effective law makes him “weak on crime.” That’s pathetic.
Correction: A previous version of this piece implied the First Step Act did not make substantial changes to the 1994 crime bill. The piece now clarifies that the First Step Act changed an automatic life sentence for repeat offenders to a 25-year minimum sentence instead.
