- [Narrator] This is a special report.

President Clinton's State of the Union Address to a joint session of Congress.

- Thank you very much.

- Bill Clinton is leaning into sort of, we gotta be tough on crime because Bill Clinton is trying to save his Presidency after losing the Midterm Election.

- Bill Clinton feels the pressure to prove that he can be just as harsh and just as punitive as Republicans on the issue of law and order and crime.

- In our toughest neighborhoods, on our meanest streets, we have seen a stunning and simultaneous breakdown of community, family, and work.

This has created a vast vacuum which has been filled by violence and drugs, and gangs.

- The Congressional Black Caucus approached the President of the United States and they say, "Look, our constituents are telling us we need to do something.

We have to fix this."

- There are Black people who were represented by these people who live in these neighborhoods who wanted something to happen.

They wanted people who repeat offenders to go to jail for a while.

They wanted to have people stop shooting guns freely in their neighborhoods.

- I encourage all my colleagues to vote for the bipartisan crime bill.

- One step is, you must take back the streets and you take back the streets by more cops, more prisons, more physical protection for the people.

It doesn't matter whether or not they're the victims of society.

The end result is they're about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons.

So I don't wanna ask, "What made them do this?"

They must be taken off the street.

- When this bill is law we will have 100,000 police officers on the street, a 20% increase.

It will be used to bill prisons to keep 100,000 violent criminals off the street.

We will have the means by which we can say punishment will be more certain.

- The whippings of mass distraction have always been in the play.

People follow their sports teams more than they follow the things that's gonna affect them every day.

So a lot of times the bills are passed and politicians go back and forth, and all of a sudden you turn around and there's a crime bill that not only affects your present, but really seriously affects your future.

- Clinton passed a crime bill which allowed now 14-year-olds to be tried as adults, more prisons being built.

- The impact of the crime bill is devastating and felt almost immediately.

For example, the three strikes law, this idea that if you have three offenses, that you're outta here, right, like you go away, it increases your sentencing dramatically.

That is embedded into the crime bill.

- Violent crimes should be told, when you commit a third violent crime, you will be put away and put away for good.

- In fact, we had seen sentencing discrepancies when it comes to drugs.

- Cocaine versus crack.

- Crack, cocaine.

- Cocaine versus crack cocaine.

- The penalty of a possession of five grams of crack cocaine, the drug used and sold by many young Blacks, is five years in prison.

The penalty for possession of five grams of powdered cocaine, the drug favored by the white middle class, is probation.

- That's why so many people who got caught with very small amounts ended up doing really major time.

- Do you think you'll be coming back here again?

- That's hard to say.

- As a result of the Clinton administration policies, you had one in three Black males caught up in the criminal justice system, with the numbers climbing.