There's something wrong with the title of this article.



If you're currently thinking that exact thought, you're not alone. In fact, it's safe to say you'd be among the vast majority of folks who would be thinking the exact same thing. It's not simply that all of us are familiar with the famous Dostoyevsky novel Crime and Punishment, but rather we all possess an inherent understanding that the two concepts go hand in hand. There is a crime and as a result there is a punishment. We trace this notion back to biblical times starting with the "eye for an eye" mentality, soon to be followed by Hammurabi's Code, the first set of laws that codified this belief system in action. Today, it's pretty much a given that should somebody commit a crime, there will be some form of punishment for that crime. It's the basis for our own criminal justice system as well as the five Law and Order series that have graced our cable airwaves over the past two decades. As the saying from the theme song to the 1970s TV series Baretta says, "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time."



However, the notion of receiving a punishment for a crime is not as simple as it sounds. Our criminal justice system is large, complex, and rife with inconsistencies. Private prisons are a multi-million dollar industry creating a business model where the more people locked up, the more financially successful the industry becomes. There are different sentences for using different versions of the same drug, something that disproportionately affects people of color. Even when there are no obvious perpetrators, certain police departments maintain a quota system, forcing officers to issue citations for relatively minor offenses. Add all this to the fact that American police departments are becoming more and more militarized as well as a string of killings of innocent African-Americans, including children, and it should be no surprise that we currently have the lowest level of police trust in twenty-two years.



But all of this didn't simply happen overnight.



And to understand how all of this happened, we need to look back to an earlier time where police trust had also become eroded: 1993. It was a period where the public had a lack of confidence in our men and women in uniform, due to it being the same time when four White Los Angeles policemen were being tried in federal court for the 1991 beating of Rodney King. This event, and more specifically the L.A. riots that followed the acquittal of the four policemen in late April of 1992, was indeed troubling but it was only the first of a series of violent acts that made national news. In late February of 1993, the nation was paralyzed as it witnessed the siege of Waco and the Branch Davidian cult where we saw the loss of 80 lives in a horrific standoff. Later, on July 1 of that year, a crazed gunman killed eight people in a law office in San Francisco in what came to be known as the 101 California Shooting, named after the street where the mass murder took place. It just over 16 months, it appeared that America was going to hell in a handbasket.



Something had to be done.



So the Clinton administration acted. In 1994 then Senator Joe Biden of Delaware helped to write a 356-page bill called the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, later to be called the Crime Bill. Among the highlights were funding for 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons, and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs. There was also a federal assault weapons ban, an expanded federal death penalty, new statutes for immigration law, hate crimes, sex crimes, and gang-related crimes, and even the authority to create a registry for sex offenders. It was the largest crime bill ever written up to that point and it initially seemed as if it would address the nationwide concern over what Americans were seeing as increased violence in their everyday lives. In fact, the Crime Bill even had the support of African-American leaders in Congress, many of whom admitted the bill was imperfect, but knew that something had to be done to protect their communities. In describing his motivation behind signing the bill, President Clinton said, "Gangs and drugs have taken over our streets and undermined our schools...Every day, we read about somebody else who has literally gotten away with murder."



It was that choice that Clinton had to make: do nothing and continue to be blamed for violent crime or attempt to do something to address the problem. And the problem was more than just a handful of isolated incidents. At the time there was a growing consensus among social scientists that the rapidly rising rate of juvenile crime would only get worse, especially among young men of color. In fact in 1995, a renowned social science professor from Princeton named John Dilulio coined a phrase for this new wave of impending criminals: superpredators. Dilulio introduced this phrase in an article for The Weekly Standard, a neoconservative magazine that had been recently founded by Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes. The article painted a dire portrait of what would happen, should there be no action taken. In fact, Dilulio even wrote: