A few days ago, if you had asked me what a super predator was, I would have hazarded a guess: “An animal with no natural predators at the top of the food chain?” I am a naturalized American citizen, and the idea of ‘super predators’ terrorizing the streets of America pre dates my arrival. So for those of us out there with little knowledge of how African American youngsters were characterized in the 1990s, why Mrs Clinton explicitly referred to these young people as super predators, and how the Clinton administration thought the problem could be solved, here’s my small contribution. My hope is that others with an informed understanding of the term and its implications will contribute their knowledge in the comments section.
The term seems to have reached wide circulation in the very early 1990’s through the work of John J Diiulio Jnr, who summarized his argument thus in 1996:
Violent crime is down in New York and many other cities, but there are two big reasons to keep the champagne corked. One is that murder, rape, robbery, and assault remain at historic highs: the streets of Manhattan, like those of Houston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles, remain much less safe today than in the 1950s and 1960s. Worse, though policing and prison policies matter, nothing affects crime rates more than the number of young males in the population—and by the year 2010, there will be about 4.5 million more males age 17 or under than there were in 1990: 8 percent more whites and 26 percent more blacks. Since around 6 percent of young males turn out to be career criminals, according to the historical data, this increase will put an estimated 270,000 more young predators on the streets than in 1990, coming at us in waves over the next two decades. ...
The second reason to keep the champagne corked is that not only is the number of young black criminals likely to surge, but also the black crime rate, both black-on-black and black-on-white, is increasing, so that as many as half of these juvenile super-predators could be young black males.
This idea seem to have matched a mood in America. In 1994, the Violent Crime Control Act was signed into law by President Clinton. It expanded the death penalty, provided funds for more policing, imposed tougher prison sentences, cut funds for inmate education and financed the building of extra prisons. And here is what Mrs Clinton, the First Lady had to say about the kids requiring this kind of response:
They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called 'super-predators.' No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about how they got that way but first we have to bring them to heel...."
Wow. It was a shocker for me to read those words yesterday. “Bring them to heel”?! Weren’t poverty and alienation at the roots of this apparent crime surge, not to mention racism? What was being done by the Clinton administration at that time to help turn this tide and give these young people and their families hope for a better future? Not a lot it seems. Bill Clinton signed into law the Welfare Reform Act in 1996, which ended the federal guarantee of cash assistance to the poor, limited welfare payments and turned welfare programs over to the States.
These two Acts together, it’s been argued, have fueled the massive expansion of rates of incarceration in America which disproportionately affect minorities and especially young African Americans. In 2009 the Dept of Justice estimated that approximately 12–13% of the American population was African-American, but that they made up almost 60% of the almost 2.1 million inmates in jail or prison. A 2013 Report on Racial Disparities in the United States Criminal Justice System, submitted to the United Nations, found that "one of every three black American males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime”. If that isn't a horrifically disturbing statistic, I don’t know what is.
When I think of the fact that Mrs Clinton took money from owners of private prisons for her 2016 campaign, and only returned it after a public outcry, this ‘late to the table’ American citizen is left a bit dumfounded. Because all I hear, repeated incessantly, is how the Clintons are the darlings of African Americans. So much so, her campaign is even going to be saved by them in South Carolina. How is it that the Clintons can apparently bank on African American support? Why has Bill Clinton been called the first black President? What am I missing here? There must be a lot! And I genuinely want to know, and ask you to appreciate that I am very unfamiliar with this history. So Clinton supporters, let’s hear it. And please, let’s keep the conversation courteous. We are family here.