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 (VOI/TIS) grant program. The VOI/TIS program established a $10 billion pool of grant money available from 1995 to 2001 to states that adopted policies that kept people convicted of violent crimes in prison longer. The more specific funding part required states to adopt “truth in sentencing” laws which held that people convicted of violent offenses had to serve at least 85 percent of their sentence before they would be parole-eligible.
It’s easy to see why people imagine that this provision helped drive mass incarceration: Billions of dollars became available to states, but only if they forced people to stay in prison longer. It’s a simple and compelling account of mass incarceration. It’s also incorrect.
To start, the timing is off. The VOI/TIS grants did not start until 1996, and prison populations had been growing since 1972. Between 1972 and 1994, the U.S. prison population grew from 200,000 people to just a little over 1 million. From 1995 to 2001, when the VOI/TIS grants expired, it grew by less than 300,000; the prison population grew by another 200,000 by the time it peaked in 2009. In other words, about 60 percent of the growth in U.S. prisons between 1972 and 2009 took place before the VOI/TIS program.
But even that analysis oversells the impact of VOI/TIS. To start, a 1998 evaluation by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that in 1997, only 27 states received VOI/TIS funding. Of the 27 states, 12 said the grants had no impact on their decision to adopt qualifying truth-in-sentencing laws (most had adopted them before 1994), and 11 said the grants only played a partial role in passing TIS laws since most had been considering them before 1994. A post-program follow-up found that states only claimed $3 billion of the $10 billion offered by the bill. Meaning: They left 70 percent of the money on the table.
Not that it was that much money anyway! Ten billion dollars sounds like a lot of money. But that was over six years, and possibly across 50 states, at a time when states were spending tens of billions per year on incarceration. All told, the grants from the Crime Bill amounted to about 2 to 3 percent of correctional spending.
Yet even this overstates the importance of the VOI/TIS grants. Over the duration of the program, state prison populations grew, but at an increasingly slower rate. As crime declined, the machinery of mass incarceration slowed down. A similar dynamic has played out in New York over the past 25 years: As crime declined, the number of incarcerated people decreased by 54.7 percent from 1999 to 2024.