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This video by Young Turks show what's happening on the inside of our prisons and how they relate.

Because of the Bill's mass incarceration funding and minimum sentencing, it is feeding into the system that allows this to happen. Modern Day Slavery because of it's bias against black men.

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A group of activists have recently called for a nation wide strike in American prisons to protest inhumane prison labor. Hasan Piker gives you the breakdown on prison labor.

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The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was in response to the heightened violent crimes that were happening in 1993 and 1994. Although graphs show a steadily decline since 1993 to present, the Act probably did more to hurt than help, especially in black communities. Mass incarceration and with a justice system already biased to blacks lead to the increase of blacks being sent to prisons in disproportionate percentages.

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Now with that in mind, why wouldn’t police jump to conclusions when they see a single black man fitting any vague description they have? It is ingrained their training for them to be on the lookout for suspicious people, but suspicious people who they are trained to see in one color. In Race Relations they show that officers are being trained to see blacks as the criminal. A race is a factor in police decisions. If it wasn’t then roughly the % of blacks in the population would be the same as incarcerated, but this is not true. They are hugely represented and make an alarming 40% when they only make about 13% of the general population. There is something wrong, and the Act of 1994 did not help it.

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Racial Bias Influences Law Enforcement Decisions By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 

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Racial Bias Influences Law Enforcement Decisions By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 

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“Ron Hampton, a retired police officer and executive director of the National Black Police Association, told Amnesty International in 1998, “In a training video, every criminal portrayed is black.” Page 81

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“Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department.” (March 14, 2015)

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“Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department.” (March 14, 2015)

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The systematic, seemingly never ending stories of racial violence done by police towards black people never ceases in America. This article tries to come into understanding why police are doing it, what allows for policemen in the system to be so careless towards the rights of their fellow citizens. Police in the Ferguson Police Department FPD are under investigation because of the long standing tradition of them committing acts of, “unlawful and harmful practices in policing and in the municipal court system erode police legitimacy and community trust, making policing in Ferguson less fair, less effective at promoting public safety.” (Page 283) Racial bias and stereotypes heavily play a role in why African Americans feel so unsafe with police. They know the biases out there and they also see what is in the news. If the statistics coldly show the reality of the unconstitutional practices than it must be completely disheartening and scary to have to live it. Although this is just a piece of the problem in America in one city, it shows why there is a distrust with the incarceration system that America uses. It is one where it’s foundation of law and order, the police on the streets are abusing their power.  It is logical for African Americans to be distrustful of the system that has consistently worked to abuse them. The Act of 1994 does not do anything that combats police from falling into the trap of racial profiling. Their job is hard and dangerous and one bad experience can move them into making bad decisions based on immediate fears. However, how come the Act of 1994, which allowed for the federal spending for the punishment of prisoners does nothing to protect people from wrongfully becoming prisoners? If police are able to write tickets and abuse their power in small everyday ways that it must have been trickling from above. People are letting them get away with this and it is causes the large increase in the mass incarceration problem.

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Chapter 20, All the Tigers in the World: Race and Rehabilitation in an American Prison by Robert L. Clark and Ying Yang, Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania 

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Chapter 20, All the Tigers in the World: Race and Rehabilitation in an American Prison by Robert L. Clark and Ying Yang, Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania 

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“…suggested that heredity and genetics lie at the heart of criminality, downplaying the roles of culture, environment, socioeconomic status, stereotyping a casual factions shaping public and judicial perception of criminals.” – 339

If you focus on the race and use that as the scapegoat then you can ignore the other factors. The ones that you can change but that take a little more work than simply blaming something people can’t decide. No one gets to decide the color of their skin, but they are shaped by the changing and flexible culture, environment, socioeconomic status and stereotyping. The latter are things that we can change. We don’t have to live with a culture that perpetrates one minority group as bad, however, we do because it is easy. We see it in the news because people will watch that. They don’t want to watch what is really wrong because that would require effort.

What happens then when you force a group into a rehabilitation center or prison? Yes, the job is to punish the offender for their crime, but when they get out they should be able to be productive members of society again. However, their social identity is damaged by always being a criminal. Race plays a crucial role in how they’re seen while they’re in the system. First, it is a way to control and classify them.  Second, for protection, to form a racial alliance to make surviving easier. Third as a way for the criminal justice system and government to classify and give us knowledge about their race.

When classify a criminal in the late 19th century the trend was see criminals as a race in themselves. They have their own distinct hateful features and characteristics. Unfortunately, these characteristics can be applied to anyone that people fear. Such as the lower-class urban minorities, who already have the years and centuries worth are hate on to them. It would only make sense that the negative continue to feeds the negative in people’s mind.

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As it is in the two articles, it looked like crime hit it's peak at 1993 and then as been steadily fallen from there. Now people who approve of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act would say that the two are related. The act caused the sharp decline with it's funding, programs and harsher penalties among other things.

However, there could simply be other factors. People now could just be better off and no longer live in poverty.  Maybe they're being better educated about the harmful drugs and effects of violence. In the article below there are some weird, but sometimes valid theories as to why.

"Most criminals are responding to neighborhood, economic, and health conditions that can quickly shift and improve."

People who feel like they have nothing to lose are the ones who commit violence crimes. When they now have neighbors who care for them, money in their pockets and no longer feel sick they will be less willing to hold on to the anger enough to commit violence.

It would be nice to assume that this Act was productive, considering the money they put into it, however it seems that one or two graphs isn't enough to prove it's worth. Instead, other graphs and statistics will show that the trends in mass incarceration leaves a lot to be desired and shows that they our justice and corrections system still requires a lot of work.

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Justice Lab is a column that examines the science, social science and technology of criminal justice

Over the course of the 1990s, crime rates dropped, on average, by more than one-third. It was a historic anomaly; one that scholar Frank Zimring dubbed " the great American crime decline." No one was sure how long the trend would last. Then, in 2010, the Bureau of Justice Statistics announced that the homicide rate had reached a four-decade low. ( Since then, overall crime rates have remained relatively flat.)

While everyone agrees this is fantastic news, no one, least of all researchers and experts, can agree on exactly why it happened. Below are 10 popular theories for the decline, from abortion to lead to technology to the broken windows theory, with unvarnished views from three leading researchers-Zimring; Richard Rosenfeld, chairman of a National Academy of Sciences roundtable on crime trends; and John Roman of The Urban Institute-on which are the most plausible.

The "abortion filter"

In 1999 and again in 2005, economists Steven Levitt and John Donohue triggered a sensation with their theory that the legalization of abortion was responsible for as much as half of the crime decline. The idea was that a drop in unwanted children led to better parenting and fewer delinquent young men. It's easy to see why the media loved this hypothesis, which seemed to piss off everyone else: Conservatives hated the notion that abortion might have led to a major social good, while liberals pushed back against the assumption that bad parenting had been the cause of crime in the first place.

Today, the abortion hypothesis holds less water. "Generally speaking, it has been discredited," Rosenfeld says. Violent crime continued to rise into the early years of the 1990s, when the first generation of boys who went through the "abortion filter" were already in their late teens to early 20s, older than the age-13-at which criminal behavior typically emerges. Evidence from other nations showed little relationship between the legalization of abortion and the crime rate. If abortion does account for a fraction of the American crime decline, it is likely a small one.

The happy pill thesis

Psychologists David Finkelhor and Lisa Jones suggest that crimes committed both by and against young people declined because of the ways in which antidepressants and anti-ADHD medications, like Prozac and Ritalin, improved human behavior and moods.

Rosenfeld considers this work fascinating but preliminary. "There are individual children who were highly aggressive, started their regimen of Adderall, and then calmed down. But it's a far cry from that connection to suggest the population rate of crime has come down as a consequence of the spread of this new type of medication. Case not proved."

The lead hypothesis

This is perhaps the trendiest crime decline hypothesis in 2014, and it was the subject of an entire session of the National Academy roundtable's work. The effect of lead on children's brains has been well documented: Exposure to the chemical causes aggressive behavior and cognitive delays. In the wake of the 1970 Clean Air Act, lead was removed from gasoline and, increasingly, from paint.

Economist Jessica Reyes estimates that phasing out lead was responsible for 56 percent of the reduction in violent crime (although she could find no relationship between lead and property crime). Experts still disagree about how plausible it is that lead alone could have been responsible for such a massive portion of the crime drop. "It's fair to say that our assessment of this hypothesis is 'case not proved'-or at least 'not yet proved,' " Rosenfeld said.

Aging boomers

Historians agree that the crime wave of the 1960s and 1970s had a lot to do with the baby boom: There were more young men than ever before, and young men are the people who commit most crimes. As the boomers aged out of trouble in the early 1980s, crime fell. But from 1992 to today, the period of the crime decline, there was no significant decrease in the number of young men in the United States. This suggests the size of the youth population is no longer a major driver of crime.

A small caveat: Some experts believe the growth in the population over the age of 50 has contributed to better public safety, because there are more adults monitoring young people's behavior. "My sense is that there is some connection there," Rosenfeld says, but if so, it would account for only a small percentage of the crime drop.

The tech thesis

Air conditioning and television brought people from the streets into their homes, a safer environment. Cars are now much more difficult to steal, because of sophisticated ignition and locking systems. The introduction of debit cards, including for the distribution of welfare benefits, means people carry less cash, which makes them less likely to become victims.

"These forces change the dynamic of normal life," Roman says. "How much do they explain the crime decline in the 1990s? A little bit. But they are dwarfed by the end of the crack epidemic and all the violence associated with it."

Crack is wack

There is little doubt that decreased demand for crack and heroin drove some of the initial drop in crime in the early 1990s. Crack was "a single generation drug," Rosenfeld says. "The younger generation saw the devastation crack was doing in the neighborhoods and to their older cousins, brothers, sisters, and parents. You think to the image of the crack head. It wasn't a pretty sight. There was nothing cool about it." Yet because the cooling of the crack market happened so long ago, it is not a likely cause for the continued decline over the past two decades.

The roaring '90s (and Obama-mania)

Until recently, there was little doubt that the strong economy of the 1990s and 2000s played a major role. Unemployment was low, so young men were less likely to turn to the drug trade or other criminal activity for work. Consumers felt confident in their spending power, so they did not seek out cheap, stolen goods on the black market, which decreased the demand for property crime. And though this may be difficult to remember today, Americans generally felt optimistic about their public institutions during the Clinton years.

Then came the Great Recession of 2008, from which we are still recovering. Unemployment spiked, consumer confidence plummeted, trust in political elites sank to record lows ... yet crime did not increase.

Does this mean there is no connection between the economy, trust in public institutions, and crime? Maybe not. Criminologists went back to the drawing board to consider what they might have overlooked in their previous research. In turned out that one economic indicator-high inflation-has been correlated throughout history with high crime, Rosenfeld says. Yet inflation remained low throughout the recent recession. Does this mean crime will spike when and if inflation rises? Only time will tell. Zimring, however, is skeptical about the inflation explanation, noting that in Europe, changes in inflation have not been associated with changes in the crime rate. "There's no consistent there there," he says.

Rosenfeld also wonders if African-American optimism after Barack Obama's presidential election as president may have helped keep crime rates down. "African-Americans, from 2008 to 2009, were more confident than whites were in the economy, even though on an objective level, they suffered more, economically. There is little question their spirits were buoyed by the Obama phenomenon. Can we link that in some rigorous fashion to the crime drop? Not really. But I think it's an intriguing hypothesis."

The prison boom

Because of increased drug-related arrests and mandatory minimum sentences, the American incarceration rate has more than quadrupled since 1970. Long prison sentences were supposed to incapacitate career criminals. Yet because criminals "age out" of law breaking whether or not they are in jail, incarceration itself could not have been the only driver of the crime decline.

The scholarly consensus is that mass incarceration accounted for about 10 to 20 percent of the overall crime drop since 1992. "If you did a thought experiment, let's add a million people to the prison system, and let's suppose 1 percent of them are really serious habitual offenders who commit 50 crimes per year, that's a reduction of half a million crimes," Roman says. "Whether the destruction of communities associated with mass incarceration is worth it? That's a completely different question."

Police on the beat

There are two theories of how policing prevented crime. The first is that Clinton administration funding for police departments allowed cities to put more cops on the beat, and that their increased presence prevented crime, regardless of what those officers were doing. The second is that particular policing tactics, like the broken windows approach or hot spot policing, were effective.

Hot spot, or place-based policing, in which departments use real-time crime data to flood dangerous micro-neighborhoods with officers, was effective in reducing crime, according to the work of David Weisburd, director of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University. "In virtually every city in which it has been studied, the growth of hot spot policing tends to reduce crime without, fortunately, displacing it to other areas," Rosenfeld explains.

Hot spot policing is often implemented in conjunction with the much heralded and critiqued broken windows strategy, in which police focus on making arrests for low-level misdemeanors-so-called "quality of life" crimes, such as public display of marijuana or selling single, untaxed cigarettes on the street. One of the best recent studies of policing tactics was conducted in Lowell, Mass., by Anthony Braga of Harvard and Brenda Bond of Suffolk University. It found that place-based strategies-such as increasing police presence around an abandoned building-were successful, but that broken windows-type arrests had the disadvantage of seeding distrust between communities and police.

Roman, however, is unsure if policing impacts crime rates as much as its proponents argue. He points out that three cities that experienced large crime declines-Washington, D.C., New York City, and San Diego-pursued vastly different policing strategies. In New York, the size of the police force quadrupled in the 1990s and the use of stop, question, and frisk created an "oppositional" relationship between neighborhoods and officers, Roman says. In San Diego, crime declined without a significant increase in the number of police on the beat. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., police chief Cathy Lanier has critiqued hot spot policing and stop, question, and frisk and has focused on community-oriented policing, even speaking about the need to hire officers who display "empathy."

Immigration and Gentrification

Given that some American cities, regardless of policing tactics, experienced big crime declines while others remained dangerous, a few criminologists began to wonder if two other urban trends of the past 30 years had impacted crime: increased immigration and gentrification.

Roman notes that cities with more Central American immigration, such as New York, Dallas, and San Diego, experienced bigger crime declines than cities with fewer immigrants, such as Philadelphia or Baltimore. Why? After upwardly mobile immigrants flood a chronically high-poverty neighborhood once characterized by inter-generational poverty, middle-class artists and professionals begin to arrive, bringing "wealth, resources, and political capital that didn't previously exist," he says. "It creates a virtuous cycle. Places become safer and it expands throughout the city." The powerful intervention, Roman writes, is not displacement of the poor (which only moves crime from one neighborhood to another), but rather the positive effects of integration, in which people of different races and classes live in close proximity to one another.

In the end, each of these 10 theories probably hold some limited explanatory power. What social scientists have learned over the past 30 years, according to Zimring, is that "serious crime is a more superficial behavior" than people assumed back in the era of so-called " superpredator " kids. Most criminals are responding to neighborhood, economic, and health conditions that can quickly shift and improve. "Crime rates can change when deep structures don't change," Zimring says.

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10 (Not Entirely Crazy) Theories Explaining the Great Crime Decline

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Justice Lab is a column that examines the science, social science and technology of criminal justice Over the course of the 1990s, crime rates dropped, on average, by more than one-third. It was a historic anomaly; one that scholar Frank Zimring dubbed " the great American crime decline."

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As shown above, the increase of sentenced inmates means that the trends also increase. Between 1925 to 1974 the change was mild compared to the jump we see in the late 1980s and 1990s. The bill funds prisons, without prisons you cannot put prisoners in them. Probably, one of the reason for the increase is that they had money to spend on housing. This meant that judges could sentence more people into prisons because now they have a place to go. another reason could simply be popular increase, although the one of the biggest would be the baby boom after World War 2 and it doesn't show much boom in the 1970s, where they could be turning adults. Another reason for the trend could be that their were more mandatory minimum sentencing being done in courts.

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Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends Project

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Pace of Decline Slows in Past Decade

Note

Some trends shown in this report have been updated. Rates for overall gun deaths, firearm homicides and firearm suicides have been updated through 2013. The rate for non-fatal violent firearms victimizations has been updated through 2014. Updated charts and information can be found here.

Chapter 1: Overview

National rates of gun homicide and other violent gun crimes are strikingly lower now than during their peak in the mid-1990s, paralleling a general decline in violent crime, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data. Beneath the long-term trend, though, are big differences by decade: Violence plunged through the 1990s, but has declined less dramatically since 2000.

Compared with 1993, the peak of U.S. gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010, and there were fewer deaths, even though the nation's population grew. The victimization rate for other violent crimes with a firearm-assaults, robberies and sex crimes-was 75% lower in 2011 than in 1993. Violent non-fatal crime victimization overall (with or without a firearm) also is down markedly (72%) over two decades.

Nearly all the decline in the firearm homicide rate took place in the 1990s; the downward trend stopped in 2001 and resumed slowly in 2007. The victimization rate for other gun crimes plunged in the 1990s, then declined more slowly from 2000 to 2008. The rate appears to be higher in 2011 compared with 2008, but the increase is not statistically significant. Violent non-fatal crime victimization overall also dropped in the 1990s before declining more slowly from 2000 to 2010, then ticked up in 2011.

Despite national attention to the issue of firearm violence, most Americans are unaware that gun crime is lower today than it was two decades ago. According to a new Pew Research Center survey, today 56% of Americans believe gun crime is higher than 20 years ago and only 12% think it is lower.

Looking back 50 years, the U.S. gun homicide rate began rising in the 1960s, surged in the 1970s, and hit peaks in 1980 and the early 1990s. (The number of homicides peaked in the early 1990s.) The plunge in homicides after that meant that firearm homicide rates in the late 2000s were equal to those not seen since the early 1960s. The sharp decline in the U.S. gun homicide rate, combined with a slower decrease in the gun suicide
rate, means that gun suicides now account for six-in-ten firearms deaths, the highest share since at least 1981.

Trends for robberies followed a similar long-term trajectory as homicides ( National Research Council, 2004), hitting a peak in the early 1990s before declining.

This report examines trends in firearm homicide, non-fatal violent gun crime victimization and non-fatal violent crime victimization overall since 1993. Its findings on firearm crime are based mainly on analysis of data from two federal agencies. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, using information from death certificates, are the source of rates, counts and trends for all firearm deaths, homicide and suicide, unless otherwise specified. The Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey, a household survey conducted by the Census Bureau, supplies annual estimates of non-fatal crime victimization, including those where firearms are used, regardless of whether the crimes were reported to police. Where relevant, this report also quotes from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (see text box at the end of this chapter and the Methodology appendix for more discussion about data sources).

Researchers have studied the decline in firearm crime and violent crime for many years, and though there are theories to explain the decline, there is no consensus among those who study the issue as to why it happened.

There also is debate about the extent of gun ownership in the U.S., although no disagreement that the U.S. has more civilian firearms, both total and per capita, than other nations. Compared with other developed nations, the U.S. has a higher homicide rate and higher rates of gun ownership, but not higher rates for all other crimes. (See Chapter 5 for more details.)

In the months since the mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school in December, the public is paying close attention to the topic of firearms; according to a recent Pew Research Center survey ( Pew Research Center, April 2013) no story received more public attention from mid-March to early April than the debate over gun control. Reducing crime has moved up as a priority for the public in polling this year.

Mass shootings are a matter of great public interest and concern. They also are a relatively small share of shootings overall. According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics review, homicides that claimed at least three lives accounted for less than 1% of all homicide deaths from 1980 to 2008. These homicides, most of which are shootings, increased as a share of all homicides from 0.5% in 1980 to 0.8% in 2008, according to the bureau's data. A Congressional Research Service report, using a definition of four deaths or more, counted 547 deaths from mass shootings in the U.S. from 1983 to 2012.

Looking at the larger topic of firearm deaths, there were 31,672 deaths from guns in the U.S. in 2010. Most (19,392) were suicides; the gun suicide rate has been higher than the gun homicide rate since at least 1981, and the gap is wider than it was in 1981.

Knowledge About Crime

Despite the attention to gun violence in recent months, most Americans are unaware that gun crime is markedly lower than it was two decades ago. A new Pew Research Center survey (March 14-17) found that 56% of Americans believe the number of crimes involving a gun is higher than it was 20 years ago; only 12% say it is lower and 26% say it stayed the same. (An additional 6% did not know or did not answer.)

Men (46%) are less likely than women (65%) to say long-term gun crime is up. Young adults, ages 18 to 29, are markedly less likely than other adults to say long-term crime is up-44% do, compared with more than half of other adults. Minority adults are more likely than non-Hispanic whites to say that long-term gun crime is up, 62% compared with 53%.

Asked about trends in the number of gun crimes "in recent years," a plurality of 45% believe the number has gone up, 39% say it is about the same and 10% say it has gone down. (An additional 5% did not know or did not answer.) As with long-term crime, women (57%) are more likely than men (32%) to say that gun crime has increased in recent years. So are non-white adults (54%) compared with whites (41%). Adults ages 50 and older (51%) are more likely than those ages 18-49 (42%) to believe gun crime is up.

What is Behind the Crime Decline?

Researchers continue to debate the key factors behind changing crime rates, which is part of a larger discussion about the predictors of crime. There is consensus that demographics played some role: The outsized post-World War II baby boom, which produced a large number of people in the high-crime ages of 15 to 20 in the 1960s and 1970s, helped drive crime up in those years.

A review by the National Academy of Sciences of factors driving recent crime trends ( Blumstein and Rosenfeld, 2008) cited a decline in rates in the early 1980s as the young boomers got older, then a flare-up by mid-decade in conjunction with a rising street market for crack cocaine, especially in big cities. It noted recruitment of a younger cohort of drug seller with greater willingness to use guns. By the early 1990s, crack markets withered in part because of lessened demand, and the vibrant national economy made it easier for even low-skilled young people to find jobs rather than get involved in crime.

At the same time, a rising number of people ages 30 and older were incarcerated, due in part to stricter laws, which helped restrain violence among this age group. It is less clear, researchers say, that innovative policing strategies and police crackdowns on use of guns by younger adults played a significant role in reducing crime.

Some researchers have proposed additional explanations as to why crime levels plunged so suddenly, including increased access to abortion and lessened exposure to lead. According to one hypothesis, legalization of abortion after the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision resulted in fewer unwanted births, and unwanted children have an increased risk of growing up to become criminals. Another theory links reduced crime to 1970s-era reductions in lead in gasoline; children's exposure to lead causes brain damage that could be associated with violent behavior. The National Academy of Sciences review said it was unlikely that either played a major role, but researchers continue to explore both factors.

The plateau in national violent crime rates has raised interest in the topic of how local differences might influence crime levels and trends. Crime reductions took place across the country in the 1990s, but since 2000, patterns have varied more by metropolitan area or city.

One focus of interest is that gun ownership varies widely by region and locality. The National Academy of Sciences review of possible influences on crime trends said there is good evidence of a link between firearm ownership and firearm homicide at the local level; "the causal direction of this relationship remains in dispute, however, with some researchers maintaining that firearm violence elevates rates of gun ownership, but not the reverse."

There is substantial variation within and across regions and localities in a number of other realms, which complicates any attempt to find a single cause for national trends. Among the variations of interest to researchers are policing techniques, punishment policies, culture, economics and residential segregation.

Internationally, a decline in crime, especially property crime, has been documented in many countries since the mid-1990s. According to the authors of a 30-country study on criminal victimization ( Van Dijk et al., 2007), there is no general agreement on all the reasons for this decline. They say there is a general consensus that demographic change-specifically, the shrinking proportion of adolescents across Europe-is a common factor causing decreases across Western countries. They also cite wider use of security measures in homes and businesses as a factor in reducing property crime.

But other potential explanations-such as better policing or increased imprisonment-do not apply in Europe, where policies vary widely, the report noted

Among the major findings of this Pew Research Center report:

U.S. Firearm Deaths

In 2010, there were 3.6 gun homicides per 100,000 people, compared with 7.0 in 1993, according to CDC data.

In 2010, CDC data counted 11,078 gun homicide deaths, compared with 18,253 in 1993.

Men and boys make up the vast majority (84% in 2010) of gun homicide victims. The firearm homicide rate also is more than five times as high for males of all ages (6.2 deaths per 100,000 people) as it is for females (1.1 deaths per 100,000 people).

By age group, 69% of gun homicide victims in 2010 were ages 18 to 40, an age range that was 31% of the population that year. Gun homicide rates also are highest for adults ages 18 to 24 and 25 to 40.

A disproportionate share of gun homicide victims are black (55% in 2010, compared with the 13% black share of the population). Whites were 25% of victims but 65% of the population in 2010. Hispanics were 17% of victims and 16% of the population in 2010.

The firearm suicide rate (6.3 per 100,000 people) is higher than the firearm homicide rate and has come down less sharply. The number of gun suicide deaths (19,392 in 2010) outnumbered gun homicides, as has been true since at least 1981.

U.S. Firearm Crime Victimization

In 2011, the NCVS estimated there were 181.5 gun crime victimizations for non-fatal violent crime (aggravated assault, robbery and sex crimes) per 100,000 Americans ages 12 and older, compared with 725.3 in 1993.

In terms of numbers, the NCVS estimated there were about 1.5 million non-fatal gun crime victimizations in 1993 among U.S. residents ages 12 and older, compared with 467,000 in 2011.

U.S. Other Non-fatal Crime

The victimization rate for all non-fatal violent crime among those ages 12 and older-simple and aggravated assaults, robberies and sex crimes, with or without firearms-dropped 53% from 1993 to 2000, and 49% from 2000 to 2010. It rose 17% from 2010 to 2011.

Although not the topic of this report, the rate of property crimes-burglary, motor vehicle theft and theft-also declined from 1993 to 2011, by 61%. The rate for these types of crimes was 351.8 per 100,000 people ages 12 and older in 1993, 190.4 in 2000 and 138.7 in 2011.

Context

The number of firearms available for sale to or possessed by U.S. civilians (about 310 million in 2009, according to the Congressional Research Service) has grown in recent years, and the 2009 per capita rate of one person per gun had roughly doubled since 1968. It is not clear, though, how many U.S. households own guns or whether that share has changed over time.

Crime stories accounted for 17% of the total time devoted to news on local television broadcasts in 2012, compared with 29% in 2005, according to Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Crime trails only traffic and weather as the most common type of story on these newscasts.

About the Data

Findings in this report are based on two main data sources:

Data on homicides and other deaths are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on information from death certificates filed in state vital statistics offices, which includes causes of death reported by attending physicians, medical examiners and coroners. Data also include demographic information about decedents reported by funeral directors, who obtain that information from family members and other informants. Population data, used in constructing rates, come from the Census Bureau. Most statistics were obtained via the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control's Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS), available from URL: www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars. Data are available beginning in 1981; suitable population data do not exist for prior years. For more details, see Appendix 4.

Estimates of crime victimization are from the National Crime Victimization Survey, a sample survey conducted for the Bureau of Justice Statistics by the Census Bureau. Although the survey began in 1973, this report uses data since 1993, the first year employing an intensive methodological redesign. The survey collects information about crimes against people and households, but not businesses. It provides estimates of victimization for the population ages 12 and older living in households and non-institutional group quarters; therefore it does not include populations such as homeless people, visiting foreign tourists and business travelers, or those living in institutions such as military barracks or mental hospitals. The survey collects information about the crimes of rape, sexual assault, personal robbery, aggravated and simple assault, household burglary, theft, and motor vehicle theft. For more details, see Appendix 4.

Roadmap to the Report

The remainder of this report is organized as follows. Chapter 2 explores trends in firearm homicide and all firearm deaths, as well as patterns by gender, race and age. Chapter 3 analyzes trends in non-fatal violent gun crime victimizations, as well as patterns by gender, race and age. Chapter 4 looks at trends and subgroup patterns for non-fatal violent crime victimizations overall. Chapter 5 examines issues related to the topic of firearms: crime news, crime as a public priority, U.S. gun ownership data, and comparison of ownership and crime rates with those in other nations. Appendices 1-3 consist of detailed tables with annual data for firearm deaths, homicides and suicides, as well as non-fatal firearm and overall non-fatal violent crime victimization, for all groups and by subgroup. Appendix 4 explains the report's methodology.

Notes on Terminology

All references to whites, blacks and others are to the non-Hispanic components of those populations. Hispanics can be of any race.

"Aggravated assault," as defined by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, is an attack or attempted attack with a weapon, regardless of whether an injury occurred, and an attack without a weapon when serious injury results.

The terms "firearm" and "gun" are used interchangeably.

"Homicides," which come from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, are fatal injuries inflicted by another person with intent to injure or kill. Deaths due to legal intervention or operations of war are excluded. Justifiable homicide is not identified.

"Robbery," as defined by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, is a completed or attempted theft, directly from a person, of property or cash by force or threat of force, with or without a weapon, and with or without injury.

"Sex crime," as defined by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, includes attempted rape, rape and sexual assault.

"Simple assault," as defined by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, is an attack (or attempted assault) without a weapon resulting either in no injury, minor injury (for example, bruises, black eyes, cuts, scratches or swelling) or in undetermined injury requiring less than two days of hospitalization.

"Victimization" is based on self-reporting in the National Crime Victimization Survey, which includes Americans ages 12 and older. For personal crimes (which in this report include assault, robbery and sex crime), it is expressed as a rate based on the number of victimizations per 100,000 U.S. residents ages 12 and older. See the Methodology appendix for more details.

Acknowledgments

Many researchers and scholars contributed to this report. Senior writer D'Vera Cohn wrote the body of the report. Paul Taylor, senior vice president of the Pew Research Center, provided editorial guidance. Mark Hugo Lopez, senior researcher and associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center, managed the report's data analysis and wrote the report's methodology appendix. Catherine A. Gallagher, director of the Cochrane Collaboration of the College for Policy at George Mason University, provided guidance on the report's data analysis and comments on earlier drafts of the report. Lopez and Kim Parker, associate director of the Center's Social & Demographic Trends project, managed the report's development and production. Kevin T. Maass, research associate at the Cochrane Collaboration at George Mason University's College for Policy, provided analysis of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports. Research Assistants Eileen Patten and Anna Brown number-checked the report and prepared charts and tables. Patten also conducted background research on trends in crime internationally. The report was copy-edited by Marcia Kramer of Kramer Editing Services.

The report also benefited from a review by Professor Richard Felson of Pennsylvania State University. The authors also thank Andrew Kohut and Scott Keeter for their comments on an earlier draft of the report. In addition, the authors thank Kohut, Michael Dimock, Keeter and Alec Tyson, our colleagues at the Pew Research Center, for guidance on the crime knowledge public opinion survey questionnaire. Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Research Center, provided computational assistance for the report's analysis of homicide rates by race and ethnicity.

Finally, Michael Planty and Jennifer Truman of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice provided data, invaluable guidance and advice on the report's analysis of the National Crime Victimization Survey.

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Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware

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National rates of gun homicide and other violent gun crimes are strikingly lower now than during their peak in the mid-1990s, paralleling a general decline in violent crime, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data. Beneath the long-term trend, though, are big differences by decade: Violence plunged through the 1990s, but has declined less dramatically since 2000.

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In 2021, the violent crime rate in the United States was 395.7 cases per 100,000 of the population. Even though the violent crime rate has been decreasing since 1990, the United States tops the ranking of countries with the most prisoners.

Reported violent crime rate in the United States

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation tracks the rate of reported violent crimes per 100,000 U.S. inhabitants. In the timeline above, rates are shown starting in 1990. The rate of reported violent crime has fallen since a high of 758.20 reported crimes in 1991 to a low of 361.6 reported violent crimes in 2014.

In 2020, there were roughly 1.3 million violent crimes committed in the United States. This number can be compared to the total number of property crimes, roughly 6.45 million that year. Of violent crimes in 2020, there were 921,505 aggravated assaults, making this offense the most common of violent crime offenses.

Law enforcement officers and crime clearance

Though the violent crime rate was down in 2013, the number of law enforcement officers also fell. Between 2005 and 2009, the number of law enforcement officers in the United States rose from around 673,100 to 708,600. However, since 2009, the number of officers fell to a low of 626,900 officers in 2013. The number of law enforcement officers has since grown, reaching 696,644 in 2020.

In 2020, the crime clearance rate was highest for murders and non-negligent homicides, with around 54.4 percent of murders being solved by investigators and a suspect being charged with the crime. Roughly 46.4 percent of aggravated assaults were cleared in that year. A dossier of statistics on violent crime in the U.S. can be found here.

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Reported violent crime rate in the U.S. 2021 | Statista

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In 2021, the violent crime rate in the United States was 395.7 cases per 100,000 of the population. Even though the violent crime rate has been decreasing since 1990, the United States tops the ranking of countries with the most prisoners. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation tracks the rate of reported violent crimes per 100,000 U.S.

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Jess Jackson was one of the African American leaders who were opposed completely to the bill. He thinks that dealing with crime should be rushed. The news, he says is making it seem like this is an issue that needs to be dealt with now, that it is okay to get a solution, even if it is not the best one. He says that government policies must change to transform the society. He wants to see the neighborhoods grow, to lift them out of poverty, for healthcare to be available. He says the answer is not to fund more projects to jail prisoners, but fix the problems that cause people to turn to crime. He is completely against a bill that keeps the cycle of crime and violence their communities instead of removing people out of it.

He understands that people need "help and healing, not just threats and punishment."

He also says that even though blacks kill blacks, white kills white, and violence goes across race and ethnicity. it is only the black on white crime that is newsworthy, because when that happens buried fears come out. When whites kill blacks there is a need for revenge. He wants to fix the inherent racism he sees and reads about in the newspapers, instead of spending money on jails. He thinks the problem won't be solved with this bill.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4545493/jesse-jackson-testimony-crime-bill

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Rev. Jesse Jackson provides testimony at a hearing by the Congressional Black Caucus on the federal crime bill legislation.

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Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act

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Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act

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Please read down the columns. First I will explain the Violence Crime and Control Enforcement Act of 1994. Give context and background on why and how it was passed. Then I will introduce figures who approved and opposed the bill in the later 1990s. Then I will move to how America was being effected by the bill. The Mass Incarceration problem and how blacks feel about the Act in the early 2000s. Lastly, I will end with an article that sums up the Act after 20 years in 2014.

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Black leaders did support the Violence Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. In Jacksonville, FL in 1995 Bill Clinton is seen below walking through a high crime neighborhood.

In the last 1990s, crime rates were high. This fueled the need for an act that would hopefully curb is. There was no perfect answer and black leaders didn't think this was the perfect solution. However, they wanted to try something. It was imperfect, but they needed to start to push back somehow.

This quote from the article, "Congressional Black Caucus: “While we do not agree with every provision in the crime bill, we do believe and emphatically support the bill’s goal to save our communities, and most importantly, our children.” sums up how people were feeling. There were disagreements about the bill, but overall they were willing to let those go in order for some type of solution. They probably knew that it would be an imperfect system where the faults of the Act would fall on to their communities.

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Mass Incarceration in the US and Mass Incarceration Visualized 

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Mass Incarceration in the US and Mass Incarceration Visualized 

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The first video above is done by the Vlog Brother, a duo of John Green and his brother Frank Green. White, Christian, Heterosexual males who educate and bring awareness to issues through this youtube channel and Crash Course. The second one is one by Bruce Western for The Atlantic. Bruce Western is an Australian-American, educated from Harvard who's primary work is done on the subject of Mass Incarceration. The Atlantic, is a very old magazine, started in Boston, MA before the 1900s. It has a liberal viewpoint.

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Democrat Rep Bernie Sanders voted for the Bill in 1994, after opposing it's earlier counterpart in 1991, the Violent Crime Prevention Act. Bernie Sanders is against capital punishment, something that this bill allows. Instead he wants to focus on what creates crime. Poverty, homelessness, drug addiction issues and other factors that lead to people turning to crime. Prisons in America do not do a good job at rehabilitation, and what you will read later is that mass incarceration is often just almost free labor. Bernie Sanders wanted to fix crime before crime happened, not to fund criminals being sent to more prisons.

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Michele Bachmann Embarrasses Herself Debating Bernie Sanders

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Bernie Sanders: Incarcerating a Country (4/13/1994)

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Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) denounces the federal crime bill, arguing that Congress needs to address the very serious issues that underlie the problems of crime and addiction - poverty, hunger, unemployment, social and economic alienation; Sanders laments the attention to jails and punishment in crime prevention.

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This is an important factor to the overall story that is African Americans as prisoners. The Clintons and American Congress purposefully create this bill to continue to harm blacks. However they should have been aware of the history that surrounds them. The racial bias talked about this video later on is the problem with having this bill. The bill made it legal and funded prisons to continue incarcerating blacks without first fixing the broken system.

This video shows the problem in depth, from the beginning to the end. The Violence Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act played a role in Slavery Evolved because it funds and legalizes the mass incarceration without dealing with racial bias. As long as black man in convicted of a crime, their are funds to send him to prison and then to work for lower than federal minimum wage. Because he is black he is already at a disadvantage because of the racial bias against him in our police ground word. Without fixing one, you cannot really improve another portion of it. Starting to reform the bottom tiers, like city and state police officers and their training probably would have made the Act more productive and more fair for minorities who feel criminalized.

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Taking advantage of people for commercial gain is not something new to America's capitalistic community that thrived from the labor of slavery in the 18th century. Since racial bias has not been wiped out from our justice system it is easy to see the correlations that black communities make when looking at our prisons system.

Before African Americans were forced into slavery and treated like property. It was very common for them to not earn wages, they were forced to do the work no one else wanted to do and live in fear of the law. While in prisons today, prisoners are expected to work about 8 hours a day doing jobs for big companies who receive tax breaks for it. They work long hours and do not get federal minimum wage. An argument could be made they receive housing from the state and that is why their wages are so low. However, they are not unionized and are in prisons to keep the law in order, not to work for big companies.

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2010 Race/Ethnicity Breakdown of % of US Population and % Incarcerated

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2010 Race/Ethnicity Breakdown of % of US Population and % Incarcerated

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This shows the discrepancy between the three races. It would make more logical sense if the % were about the same. There are unanswered factors as well, and one of the questions we should ask is, "Do blacks commit more crimes, or are they being treated unfairly by the system?" Depending on who you ask, the answer varies.

Looking at this chart, more than a 1/3 of all US incarcerated prisoners are black, although they make only 13% of the US population. While whites, the majority of the US population is almost cut in half in terms of how many are incarcerated now. Clearly with this chart there is a major discrepancy for Black people. They make only 12% of the total US population but 40% of the US incarcerated population. Why are black people being incarcerated so much?

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Shows the increase between 1995 and 2003 the increased of sentenced inmates in Federal prisons. There was as totally 78.7% change and 100% total growth. Public order increased the highest and than Drug offenses did as well.

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Booker, Teresa A. "All the Tigers in the World: Race and Rehabilitation in an American Prison." Public Space, Public Policy, and Public Understanding of Race and Ethnicity in America: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Akron, OH: U of Akron, 2016. N. pag. Print.

Cohn, D’Vera, Paul Taylor, Mark Hugo Lopez, Catherine A. Gallagher, Kim Parker, and Kevin T. Maass. "Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware." Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends Project. N.p., 07 May 2013. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

CSPAN. "1996: Hillary Clinton on "superpredators" (C-SPAN)." YouTube. YouTube, 25 Feb. 2016. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

Cohn, D’Vera, Paul Taylor, Mark Hugo Lopez, Catherine A. Gallagher, Kim Parker, and Kevin T. Maass. "Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware." Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends Project. N.p., 07 May 2013. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

"Corrections." (n.d.): n. pag. Trans in US Corrections. The Sentencing Project, 2014. Web.

Ejiorg. "Slavery to Mass Incarceration." YouTube. YouTube, 07 July 2015. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

"Find Votes." U.S. Senate: Roll Call Vote. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

Goldstein, Dana. "10 (Not Entirely Crazy) Theories Explaining the Great Crime Decline." The Marshall Project. N.p., 16 Nov. 2016. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

Http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5FyGGTi6VoT7kRxyPBZ55A. "Bernie Sanders: Incarcerating a Country (4/13/1994)." YouTube. YouTube, 23 July 2015. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

"Jesse Jackson Testimony on Crime Bill." C-SPAN.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

Neyfakh, Leon. "The 1994 Crime Bill Was Intended to Help, Not Hurt, Black Americans. Does That Matter?" Slate Magazine. N.p., 12 Feb. 2016. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

"Prisoners-without-rights-1994-35-pp." Human Rights Documents Online (n.d.): n. pag. Prisoners in 1994. U.S. Department of Justice, Aug. 1995. Web.

TheAtlantic. "Mass Incarceration, Visualized." YouTube. YouTube, 02 Oct. 2015. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

TheYoungTurks. "Prison Labor = Modern Day Slavery?" YouTube. YouTube, 15 Sept. 2016. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

"U.S.: Violent Crime Rate Graph 1990-2015 | Statista." Statista. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

"Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (1994 - H.R. 3355)." GovTrack.us. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

Vlogbrothers. "Mass Incarceration in the US." YouTube. YouTube, 04 Apr. 2014. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

Williams, Chad Louis, Kidada E. Williams, and Keisha N. Blain. "“Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department.”." Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence. Athens: U of Georgia, 2016. N. pag. Print.

Winters, Paul A. "Racial Bias Influences Law Enforcement Decisions." Race Relations: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 1996. N. pag. Print.

"20 Years Later, Parts Of Major Crime Bill Viewed As Terrible Mistake." NPR. NPR, n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2016.

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Hillary's 1996, controversial statement about young black petty criminals becoming "super-predators", a term she now regrets using. the term super-predator was aimed at youths who were in gangs, committing crimes without empathy or conscience. However , Clinton did not say that "super-predators" were only African America, or African American at all. It is just that when thinking about gang related crimes, or crimes committed due to gang violence there is a trend to think of those youths as African American.

The "super predator" comment also at the implication that children have to be held accountable for their actions, almost as adults based on their crimes. Since they have no conscience or empathy, but it should be remembered that children cannot be held responsible, because they are not entirely developed.

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1996: Hillary Clinton on "superpredators" (C-SPAN)

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Here is complete clip of Hillary Clinton's 1996 reference to ‪"‎superpredators‬." Watch the full video of her speech here: http://cs.pn/1nVtFW3

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Black leaders knew that the justice system was sometimes against them. Racial bias did not end after they got their rights legally and at the same time, it was not something new. As the news show us now and with the new technology and trend to video tape everything, we can see the injustice and racial profiling now. The black leaders then knew of this too, however as the graphs show below. Crime was at an all time high. The peak was 747.1 reported violent crimes out of 100,000 people in 1993. Most of these violent crimes were probably affecting their communities.

Looking back at what has happened makes it easy to point fingers, but black leaders, especially those who are serving or served as police. Mass incarceration is becoming a problem, especially for black men who 1 out of 3 will be jailed at some point in their lives.

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The NPR Article explains the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act as "a long-term experiment in various ways to fight crime." Many would say the experiment has failed. Crime rates are down, but the evidence shows that the Act isn't the cause for that. Instead we have mass incarcerated. States were given more money to punish people, making mandatory minimum sentences longer and increasing those incarcerated.

Now the experiment is coming to a close, it's 20 years later and many people are wondering if their tax dollars were worth it. Funding prisons and prisoners is expensive and many would become repeat offenders. There is now a push to stop crime before it happens, funding programs like Midnight Basketball, where Rev. Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat would like to see improvement made on preventative programs.
http://www.npr.org/2014/09/12/347736999/20-years-later-major-crime-bill-viewed-as-terrible-mistake

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History of the H.R. 3355 (103rd): Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994

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History of the H.R. 3355 (103rd): Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994

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The Violent Crime and Control Act was introduced in Oct 26th 1993 and signed by the President Sept 13th 1994, it was in the works for 11 months total. The Act had bi-partisan support, being passed by 95% of the Senate vote.

In each of the little grafts showing the bold blue or red dots you can see that there was a lot of support from both parties. This means that the bill appealed to the left and the right, which is very difficult. This could be because almost everything senator want congressmen wanted to keep the streets safer, especially after some of the violence crimes that were committed and then brought to the media attention.

Civic Impulse. (2016). H.R. 3355 — 103rd Congress: Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994.