An Entire Class of Thieves

When Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose back in 1986 Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan raced each other to show the world who could punish the poor quickest and hardest. The White House urged the DEA to take ABC News along to raids on crack houses in South Central LA. O'Neill drove through the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, with its twenty-nine new mandatory-minimum sentences, and the 100-to-1 disparity in sentencing for crack/powder cocaine dealers. We were on our way to lockup time for the poor, mostly young blacks and Hispanics. At present rates, the chances of a black man being locked up sometime in his life are one in four.

All through the 1980s and '90s professorial mountebanks like James Q. Wilson, John DiIulio and Charles Murray grew sleek from bestsellers about the criminal, probably innate propensities of the "underclass," about the pathology of poverty, the teen predators, the collapse of morals, the irresponsibility of teen moms.

Now, there was indeed a vast criminal class coming to full vicious potential in the 1990s: a group utterly devoid of the most elementary instincts of social propriety, vacant of moral fiber, selfish to an almost unfathomable degree. The class came in the form of our corporate elite.

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