A quarter-century on, criminal justice advocates agree that the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed by Bill Clinton in September 1994, was a disaster for poor people and people of color, and a driver of mass incarceration. Elected officials, policy experts and academics have recently sought to undo this damage by reimagining public safety. But too many of them are keeping law enforcement central to their vision for reform. This is a fundamental mistake.They are not reimagining public safety. They are reimagining mass incarceration.

The reality is this: The police fill prisons. We can’t repair the harm that the 1994 crime bill has done by promoting mass incarceration without reducing the size and scope of the police.

The crime bill articulated an obsession with punishment and prescribed policing as the cure to a host of social ills. It provided funding for 100,000 new police officers, $14 billion in grants for community-oriented policing, $9.7 billion for prisons and $6.1 billion crime prevention programs. The legislation was partly responsible for a 30 percent increase in police officers from 699,000 in 1990 to 899,000 in 1999, and funded over 7,000 school officers. Today, there are over one million law enforcement officers in the United States

But did the plan work? The Government Accountability Office concluded that while there was a 26 percent decline in overall crime from 1993 to 2000, only 1.3 percent of the decline could be attributed to additional police officers. The majority of that decrease, the office said, came from other, unspecified factors; smaller studies have found that everything from preschool to job programs for young people decreases crime rates.