Chapter 156 - Breakin’ the Law: The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1982
Above: A pair of NYPD officers ride the subway in the early 1980s, by that time, crime in New York City was said to have reached “epidemic proportions” (left); Scruff McGruff the Crime Dog, an anthropomorphic animated bloodhound created by Jack Keil (who also voiced the character) through the Ad Council and later the National Crime Prevention Council to increase crime awareness and personal safety in the United States (right).
“There I was completely wasting, out of work and down
All inside it's so frustrating as I drift from town to town
Feel as though nobody cares if I live or die
So I might as well begin to put some action in my life
You know what it's called
Breaking the law, breaking the law
Breaking the law, breaking the law
Breaking the law, breaking the law
Breaking the law, breaking the law” - “Breakin’ the Law” by Judas Priest
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists upon.” - Robert F. Kennedy
Heading into 1982 - his second year in office - President Robert Kennedy knew that he needed to choose another area to focus on with his major legislative push for the year.
The so-called “Long-Ullman Tax Cut”, Kennedy’s major achievement from the year prior, had delivered on two of his key campaign pledges: turning the budget deficit into a surplus (and in so doing, refilling Congress’ “rainy day fund”); and giving the vast majority of Americans tax relief in order to stimulate the economy.
This had its intended effect.
In addition to easing the financial burden on working and middle class families, these tax cuts, when combined with lowered interest rates by the Federal Reserve, caused aggregate demand to explode at the tail end of 1981 and into the first quarter of 1982. By year’s end, real GDP growth was as high as 5%. The economy, at long last, was leaving behind the doldrums of the “Seesaw Seventies” and roaring back to life.
Democrats, especially the president and his advisors, were eager to take credit for “slaying stagflation” and returning the nation to prosperity. The truth, of course, is more complex and nuanced than this. The efforts of the Bush and Udall administrations to bring inflation to heel were clearly prerequisites for economic success under President Kennedy. But politically, the sunny economic forecasts were great for the administration, especially heading into a midterm election year.
The midterms. Bobby Kennedy thought to himself, as Jack had twenty years prior.
It’s already all about the midterms.
Even as he enjoyed approval ratings hovering around the 58% mark thanks to the success of his tax reform bill, the president understood all too well the “what have you done for me lately?” nature of American politics.
For the next task on his agenda, he needed to find an issue which: A, reflected another of his major campaign pledges; B, could make some meaningful difference in the lives of the American public; and C, ideally gave his fellow Democrats something substantial to run on come November. The administration held a series of policy meetings at the White House and on Capitol Hill after New Year’s. At these meetings, one issue seemed to come up again and again: crime.
President Kennedy had largely built his own reputation as a crusader against corruption and especially organized crime while working as a counsel for the US Senate in the 1950s.
Beginning at the tail end of his brother’s administration, and really ramping up throughout the 1970s, the national crime rate in the United States more than quadrupled. Especially concerning to the public was the rate of violent crime, which had also risen within the same timeframe. This trend was even reflected in the fact that, beginning with Jack Kennedy, every American president had suffered at least one serious assassination attempt (whether as a candidate or once elected president). Bob Kennedy was no exception. He still carried the bullet fired at him by his would-be assassin, Mark Chapman, and walked with a cane from the subsequent nerve damage.
The causes for this so-called “crime epidemic” were myriad.
First among them were socioeconomic factors.
The 1970s were, as has been covered exhaustively within this chronicle, hard times economically. Wages stagnated while prices shot up. Unemployment rose, increasing rates of poverty and homelessness along with it. For many living in poverty, crime was not necessarily a conscious choice, but rather a means to the end of mere survival.
After decades of “white flight” to the suburbs, many major metropolitan areas lost much of their tax base and subsequently experienced sudden and severe urban decay. As cities struggled to maintain their solvency (most dramatically seen in New York), more municipal and local workers were laid off or had their wages or hours reduced, further exacerbating economic tensions. Rates of mental illness were also high during this period, probably correlated to (if not outright caused by) the aforementioned economic downturn.
On a more sociocultural level, there were other issues.
High divorce rates and a general deficiency of family planning resources resulted in many broken homes across the country. Though expanding Medicare as a public option to cover all Americans who needed health insurance did ameliorate some of the burden on families, both in terms of providing healthcare coverage and access to contraceptives, their use did not become immediately widespread. Teen pregnancy rates were also high during this period, resulting in some parents who were unready to raise children. The social stigma associated with such situations also alienated these young parents and resulted in many not seeking help or assistance, whether from available government programs, or from private charities, or in some cases, even family, friends, and other loved ones.
Conservative pundits also pointed out a breakdown in “American values” such as hard work, individual initiative, and personal responsibility, as possible causes for the crime epidemic, though this argument is difficult to prove due to a lack of quantifiable data.
Also deeply interconnected with the crime epidemic was the so-called “War on Drugs”.
Above: A U.S. government PSA from the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration with a photo image of two marijuana cigarettes (“joints”) and a “Just Say No” slogan (left); the seal for the Drug Enforcement Administration (right).
First launched by the Romney administration in 1970, then massively expanded with the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973 by President Bush, the “War on Drugs” contributed heavily to the national crime rate by making actions that millions of Americans performed every year explicitly illegal.
The best analogy for this effect is probably what resulted from the ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1919, which forbade the consumption, manufacture, and sale of almost all alcoholic beverages in the United States - “Prohibition” - until its repeal with the 21st Amendment in 1933. Though Prohibition did initially succeed in its goal of reducing drinking in the US, by as early as 1922, drinking was once again on the rise. Had Prohibition not been repealed, it is likely that rates of American drinking would still have surpassed pre-Prohibition levels by 1933. Prohibition was thus roundly condemned as a massive failure and few mourned its loss. But to some extent, this can perhaps be explained by alcohol’s status as a socially acceptable drug, as opposed to marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and other narcotics.
By the time of President Robert Kennedy’s inauguration in 1981, as many as 90% of all crimes committed in the United States were drug-related, up from just under half during his brother’s time in office. Though statistics show a small increase in drug use during the intervening decade, that small increase
did not and
could not explain the massive increase in arrests and incarcerated persons related to drug offenses.
Clearly, just as Prohibition had in the 1920s, the War on Drugs was turning everyday, non-violent Americans into criminals, simply as a matter of course. If crime was going to be brought to heel, then so too did the federal government need to review its drug policies.
To that end, two competing philosophies emerged.
The first was the “traditional” method of combating drug use: criminal prohibition and law enforcement. Advocates for this school of thought (mostly conservatives and “law and order” types) advocated “tougher” policies to “revitalize” the War on Drugs. They wanted: mandatory minimum sentencing for drug users, dealers, and anyone involved with the drug trade; so-called “three strikes” policies for drug offenders; and more resources to be allocated for hiring more police officers and better arming and equipping law enforcement to combat gangs and cartels.
Critics of this line of thought (including the president and his brother, Senator Ted Kennedy) argued that this “revitalization” really amounted to an “escalation”. They felt that such methods would fail to address the root cause of drug use and abuse in the first place: addiction. If the government’s primary concern with its drug policy was punishing drug users, without treating their addiction, then recidivism rates would remain high (not to mention, keep non-violent offenders locked up for life sentences). Furthermore, these “tough” drug policies would (and where they existed, already did) unfairly and disproportionately target historically disenfranchised minority groups and communities of color. The Kennedys understood all too well how drug laws could be weaponized, even when that was not a policy’s intention.
“They’ve declared war on a noun.” Bobby privately told Ethel back in 1970. “That never ends well.”
The other method of combating drug use then emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, powered by a suite of studies conducted at Harvard, Yale, and other prestigious universities and centers of learning. Known as “harm reduction”, this philosophy favored healing what it saw as the root cause of drug use and abuse - addiction itself. Rather than think of drug abusers as criminals who needed to be punished, this method favored treating them as patients, sick with a disease, who needed to be treated and rehabilitated. These were many of the same academics who had successfully lobbied the Kennedy administration the year prior to create “needle exchange sites” in order to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS from infected needles.
In pilot programs in cities and states across the country, municipalities who enacted harm reduction policies saw drops in their rates of drug addiction and recidivism by as much as 75%. Proponents of this philosophy also favored a more nuanced view on drug education, teaching “responsible drug use”, rather than treating marijuana and other drugs as some sort of inherent evil, a boogeyman to be avoided at all costs.
Advocates for both schools of thought worked within the Kennedy administration, splitting opinion on the subject. The president himself was of two minds about the issue. There were also legitimate concerns about “outdated” statutes relating to hate crimes, sexual crimes, and gang-related crime. All of these needed to be addressed if the country was going to get back on the right foot when it came to law and order.
Above: Attorney General Charlie Rangel, chairman of President Kennedy’s 1982 fact-finding commission on crime in the United States (left); seal of the National Association of Chiefs of Police (right).
In order to resolve these inconsistencies and create the most effective bill to address as many of them as possible, President Kennedy formed a fact-finding commission to make a recommendation to Congress. This commission, chaired by Attorney General Charlie Rangel, himself a noted crusader against drugs in his native Harlem and previously in the halls of Congress, worked with the 135,000 member National Association of Police Officers, and scientists at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to craft their suggestions.
Kennedy hoped that his eventual proposal could be, in his words, “tough, but fair”.
In choosing Rangel to chair the commission, however, the president empowered a man who had been, in the words of
Ebony magazine, “a front-line general in the war on drugs”. Rangel was quoted in that article about him as saying that, when it came to drug policy in America, “we need outrage!” This was making reference to the slow reaction by both government and religious leaders to the epidemics of crack cocaine, heroin, PCP, and other drugs that hit American streets during the 1970s and 80s. Rangel also believed that attempts to legalize drugs would represent “moral and political suicide”. He did not refrain from criticizing those most affected by drugs, saying that Hispanic and black teenagers had no sense of self-preservation, and that drug dealers were “so stupid they had to eat in fast-food places because they could not read a menu.”
Rangel and his fellow “warriors” criticized what they saw as “timidity” or even “cowardice” on the part of commissioners who favored “harm reduction” over “escalation”. They felt that to shift federal drug policy away from the fight would be tantamount to “surrender”. There are few words more anathema to American cultural identity than “surrender”.
Meanwhile, the “harm reducers”: scientists and academics led by the president’s own brother, Ted, fired back, calling Rangel’s preferred policies “draconian” and in some cases “possibly unconstitutional”. Though both sides supported additional funding for drug prevention and treatment, they disagreed strongly on where and how the money should be spent: law enforcement or medical care.
As the weeks dragged on, word leaked to the press that little to no common ground was being found between the two camps.
The Washington Post featured a political cartoon showing Ted Kennedy and Charlie Rangel in a boxing ring labeled “federal drug policy”, with the president sitting at the side as a ring-judge. The ongoing and rapidly escalating culture war made crime a major issue, with conservatives accusing Kennedy and his fellow liberals of “not doing what is necessary to protect the American people”.
Eventually, the president sensed that what should have been an easy, bipartisan victory going into the midterms seemed to be slipping through his fingers; he called for an end to the bickering. He personally intervened to break the stalemate within the commission. With the president personally overseeing the planning sessions, and ensuring that all voices were heard, he helped orchestrate a compromise that left no one fully satisfied, but which would be much more likely to pass both the House and the Senate than either camp’s preferred version.
The compromise version of the bill, which eventually made its way through Congress included:
- The Violence Against Women Act - allocating $1.6 billion to help prevent and investigate violence against women, setting increased federal penalties for repeat sex offenders and requiring mandatory restitution for the medical and legal costs of sex crimes, and increasing federal grants for battered women's shelters, creating a National Domestic Violence Hotline, and requiring restraining orders of one state to be enforced by the other states.
- The Driver’s Privacy Protection Act - introduced by Representative Jim Moran (D - VA) after an increase in opponents of abortion rights using public driving license databases to track down and harass abortion providers and patients, most notably by both besieging one woman’s home for a month and following her daughter to school.
- Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act - established guidelines for states to track sex offenders. States were also required to track sex offenders by confirming their place of residence annually for ten years after their release into the community or quarterly for the rest of their lives if the sex offender was convicted of a violent sex crime.
- The Community Oriented Policing Services Act - Earmarked more than $1 billion per year in assistance to state and local law enforcement agencies to help hire community policing officers. The COPS Office also funds the research and development of guides, tools and training, and provides technical assistance to police departments implementing community policing principles. The law authorized the COPS Office to hire 100,000 more police officers to patrol the nation's streets, and set guidelines that officers should reside in the communities in which they policed.
- The Money Laundering Control Act - criminalized money laundering for the first time in the United States. This would be used, both Rangel and President Kennedy argued, to tamp down on large-scale criminal activity.
- The Arthur McDuffie Police Violence Prevention Act - Named for a Black insurance salesman and United States Marine Corps lance corporal who was beaten to death by four police officers after a traffic stop, resulting in the 1980 Miami Riots. The act promoted training in de-escalation techniques, strongly encouraged law enforcement to minimize targeting people of lower socioeconomic status, and earmarked money to invest in crisis intervention teams and to hire mental health professionals (including FBI-trained negotiators) for state and local law enforcement.
- The People Over Profits Act - abolished the use of for-profit (private) prisons for federal crimes and encouraged the states to follow suit. It also earmarked additional funding for rehabilitation programs, including felon higher-education programs.
Finally, and perhaps most consequentially, the act authorized billions of dollars of new federal spending. Though some would go toward bolstering the ATF, FBI, DEA, and other law enforcement agencies (much to the delight of Rangel and his fellow “warriors”), the lion’s share of this funding would be used to increase the substance abuse treatment federal block grant program. The terms “drug use” and “drug abuse” (which implied conscious choice on the part of the user) were replaced with the Kennedy brothers’ preferred phrase: “diseases of addiction”.
Other programs funded by the act included drug counseling and education programs, AIDS research, facilities for mental health treatment, social work and family counseling/planning, and international cooperation to limit drug production.
The act also included the Drug Free Schools and Communities Act, which required public schools and colleges to establish education and prevention programs to combat diseases of addiction. Rejected from the final version of the bill were concepts such as mandatory minimum sentencing and “three strikes” policies for repeat offenders.
Though conservatives attempted to add a rider making membership in a gang explicitly illegal, liberals in both parties balked on constitutional grounds. They felt that such a law would threaten the First Amendment right to free association. Distinctions between sentencing for crack versus powdered cocaine, for instance, were also left out, as many felt that these provisions would disproportionately target black and brown communities.
Above: President Robert F. Kennedy delivers a speech, calling on all members of Congress to support
the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1982, introduced on behalf of the administration.
The final version of the bill that made it through reconciliation was thus, an imperfect compromise between the two camps (“anti-drug warriors” and “harm reducers”). While the
Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1982 would not please everyone, it did seem to go a long way toward tackling the problems posed by crime and drug addiction in America. Though it initially faced stiff resistance from conservatives in both parties, Kennedy called the bill a “just” act, rather than a “vindictive” one.
In selling his bill to Congress and the American public, Kennedy praised the “noble intentions” of his predecessors’ efforts in the war on drugs, but pointed to high recidivism rates and continued drug addiction and still-rising crime as evidence of their “failure to address the roots of the problem”.
“The end of our justice system must not be purely punitive, but also restorative.” the president declared. “We must heal and reform, not simply punish and lock away.”
After months of discussion and debate, and with a majority of the public supportive of at least
most of what the act contained, the bill was introduced to the House of Representatives by Jim Wright (D - TX) on August 9th, 1982. It would pass the House eleven days later (352 - 56) and the Senate on the 30th (77 - 22). After making its way through reconciliation, the bill crossed President Kennedy’s desk on September 3rd. He signed it, marking his second major legislative accomplishment since taking office.
Though virtually all Democrats and even most Republicans ultimately voted in favor of the “1982 Crime Bill” as it came to be known, some conservatives were especially vocal in their opposition to it.
“This is a pretty watered down bill.” Senator Jesse Helms (R - NC) loudly complained on C-SPAN during debate in the Senate. “If we want to show criminals that crime doesn’t pay, I think we can do a heck of a lot better than three-hundred and fifty pages of half-measures and political correctness”. This last phrase referred to the administration’s insistence on shifting “drug use” to “diseases of addiction”.
Above: Senator Jesse Helms (R - NC), one of the chief opponents of the
1982 Comprehensive Crime Control Act, and something of a nemesis to President Kennedy. Strengthening his conservative bonafides, he argued that the bill did not go far enough toward discouraging criminals.
The act would have numerous positive effects on American society: crime rates peaked in early 1983 before dropping precipitously, a trend that continues up to the present day; rates of drug addiction likewise fell to pre-1960s levels; and Americans’ feelings of safety increased, with more officers on the streets and efforts toward community policing bolstering a sense of shared security. Urban centers in particular began to recover, bringing back economic opportunity and a renewed hope for the future in the nation’s cities.
The act also had negative consequences.
For one thing, it failed to rectify racial and class-based inequalities in the justice system. On the front of police brutality, it did not issue a ban on chokeholds, strangleholds, and other potentially deadly maneuvers. Nor did it challenge or even reexamine the policy of “qualified immunity” - legal protection for the police for most actions undertaken in the name of enforcing the law. Though the Crime bill “deemphasized” the war on drugs, shifting the federal government’s focus toward combating diseases of addiction with healthcare and treatment instead, it did not
end the war on drugs.
Despite his reservations about the “extent” to which some hardcore warriors, like Rangel, were willing to go in the name of fighting drugs on America’s streets, President Kennedy (and Congress) lacked the political will to fly in the face of public opinion, which overwhelmingly favored the war’s continuation.
The political headwinds of the country were finally beginning to shift. The president and his allies could feel it. Conservatism, long dormant and thought defeated by the forces of social liberalism, began the long, slow process of awakening from its torpor. It would take several more years for the right to truly regain its confidence after Ronald Reagan’s defeat in the 1980 election. But it was beginning to stir.
Politically, the bill was an overall win for the administration.
According to a Gallup poll conducted after President Kennedy signed it into law, just over 65% of those polled said that they “approved” or “strongly approved” of its passage. A slim majority - 56% - answered in the affirmative when asked if they considered the president to be adequately “tough on crime”. The hope of both the president and Chief of Staff (and primary political advisor) Ken O’Donnell was that that descriptor would rub off on congressional Democrats in what were sure to be contentious midterm elections.
Above: White House Chief of Staff Ken O’Donnell (left); Senator Joe Biden (D - DE), a key Kennedy ally and one of the chief authors of the “1982 Crime Bill” (right).
Next Time on Blue Skies in Camelot: Two Bald Men Fight Over a Comb
I think they look great.
