Joe Biden 2024 presidential campaign: His 1994 crime bill didn’t cause mass incarceration.

This story was produced in partnership with the Garrison Project, an independent, nonpartisan organization addressing the crisis of mass incarceration and policing. Blaming the Crime Bill for mass incarceration doesn’t just get basic facts wrong; it arises from—and contributes to—a fundamental misunderstanding of the limited way the federal government impacts prison policy, of the intractable local politics that drive mass incarceration, and of the current efforts to roll it back. When people say that the Crime Bill “caused” mass incarceration, what they are usually referring to, even if they are not aware of it, is the Violent Offender Incarceration and Truth-in-Sentencing grant program. Yet in 2019, this abiding belief that the Crime Bill in general, and the VOI/TIS grants in particular, caused mass incarceration led several Democratic representatives and senators to introduce a bill titled “The Reverse Mass Incarceration Act.” The legislation sought to create a decarceral version of the Crime Bill: It would offer roughly the same amount of money, updated for inflation, to states that cut their prison populations. The second harm that comes from focusing on the Crime Bill is that it displaces the real source of mass incarceration, away from a very local “us” and onto a more distant federal “them.” The only way that the Crime Bill could have caused mass incarceration is if the states would not have locked up more people but for the federal money.