These days, Jeremy Travis is president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. But 20 years ago, he attended the signing ceremony for the crime bill — and joined the Clinton Justice Department.
"Here's the federal government coming in and saying we'll give you money if you punish people more severely, and 28 states and the District of Columbia followed the money and enacted stricter sentencing laws for violent offenses," Travis says.
But as Travis now knows all too well, there's a problem with that idea. Researchers including a National Academy of Sciences panel he led have since found only a modest relationship between incarceration and lower crime rates.
"We now know with the fullness of time that we made some terrible mistakes," Travis said. "And those mistakes were to ramp up the use of prison. And that big mistake is the one that we now, 20 years later, come to grips with. We have to look in the mirror and say, 'look what we have done.'"
Nick Turner of Vera put the human costs even more starkly.
"If you're a black baby born today, you have a 1 in 3 chance of spending some time in prison or jail," Turner said. "If you're Latino, it's a 1 in 6 chance. And if you're white, it's 1 in 17. And so coming to terms with these disparities and reversing them, I would argue, is not only a matter of fairness and justice but it's, I would argue, a matter of national security."
