The Big House That Wayne LaPierre Built

The Big House That Wayne LaPierre Built
The NRA spent millions in the 1990s pushing the largest prison construction boom ever—and harsh sentencing to keep them full.

—By Tim Murphy
| Fri Feb. 8, 2013 3:11 AM PST


Prison overcrowding at the California Institution for Men in 2006 California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation


It sounded like a throwaway line. Toward the end of a four-hour Senate hearing on gun violence last week, Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s executive vice president of over two decades, took a break from extolling the virtues of assault rifles and waded briefly into new territory: criminal justice reform. "We've supported prison building," LaPierre said. Then he hammered California for releasing tens of thousands of nonviolent offenders per a Supreme Court order—what he'd previously termed "the largest prison break in American history."

But California's overflowing prisons, which the Supreme Court had deemed "cruel and unusual punishment" in 2011 because of squalid conditions, were partly a product of the NRA's creation. Starting in 1992, as part of a now-defunct program called CrimeStrike, the NRA spent millions of dollars pushing a slate of supposedly anti-crime measures across the country that kept America's prisons full—and built new ones to meet the demand. CrimeStrike's legacy is everywhere these days.

CrimeStrike arose out of necessity. The NRA had come into its own as a political power during the Reagan era, but by the early 1990s, it was strapped for cash. The organization ran up a $9 million deficit in 1991 and was on pace for a $30 million shortfall in 1992, even as it was preparing to go to the mattresses over assault weapons and background checks. The NRA needed a shot in the arm.

LaPierre launched CrimeStrike that spring with $2 million in seed money from the parent organization and a simple platform: mandatory minimums, harsher parole standards, adult sentences for juveniles, and, critically, more prisons. "Our prisons are overcrowded. Our bail laws are atrocious. We'll be the bad guy," he announced.

The NRA took its case to the public. "Will you let criminals rape your rights?" asked a four-page ad in a 1994 issue of Field & Stream magazine. And the real culprit was in the White House: "The Clinton administration has already cut federal prison construction by $550 million in favor of 'community placement' and 'criminal rehabilitation programs.'" This was reviving an old conservative talking point: Democrats were soft on crime. The ads featured LaPierre's signature and bespectacled, stoic face at the bottom, alongside a 1-800 number interested volunteers could call. It was a membership hotline.

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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/wayne-lapierre-crime-strike-three-strikes


A 1994 CrimeStrike ad. Google Books