Whenever people bring this up, they conveniently forget that the Black politicians and communities by and large supported the crime bill. It was right around the time the violent crime rates in the US peaked, and Black Americans were being disproportionally hurt by the amount of random and semi-random violence.
In hindsight, the law was unnecessary, some parts like the “three strikes” thing were just plain bad, and it ended being used and enforced in massively racist ways, but at the time it was a good-faith attempt to deal with a serious issue.
