Impact Although Christine Craft ultimately lost her
sex-discrimination lawsuit against Metromedia, her
legal battle brought greater public attention to the
issue. It may have helped many other female journal-
ists who wanted to be judged by performance rather
than appearance.
Further Reading
Beasley, Maurine H., and Sheila J. Gibbons.Taking
Their Place: A Documentar y Histor y of Women and
Journalism. Washington, D.C.: American Univer-
sity Press, 1993.
Craft, Christine.Christine Craft: An Anchorwoman’s
Stor y.Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1986.
___.Too Old, Too Ugly, Not Deferential to Men.
Rocklin, Calif.: Prima, 1988.
Eddith A. Dashiell
See also Age discrimination; Journalism; Sexual
harassment; Television; Women in the workforce;
Women’s rights.
Crime
Definition Transgressions of local, state, or
federal law
During the 1980’s, crime in the United States and Canada
and the manner in which policy makers managed it experi-
enced divergent paths. U.S. legislators attempted to prevent
future crimes by dealing harshly with criminals, while Ca-
nadians attempted to rehabilitate criminals and turn them
into productive members of society.
During the 1980’s, crime rates were on the rise in the
United States. State and federal governments re-
sponded to the ensuing public outcry by passing
tougher laws. Meanwhile, Canadian governments fa-
vored a gentler approach, proposing policies of res-
toration and rehabilitation rather than retribution.
Certain demographic groups, such as young people
and aboriginal peoples, were singled out for particu-
lar rehabilitation efforts, in an effort better to inte-
grate those groups into Canadian society as a whole.
Crime in the United States By the early 1980’s,
crime rates in the United States had risen to alarm-
ing levels, causing criminologists and other experts
to warn that the country could descend into a devas-
tating state of chaos. However, the 1980’s was also a
pivotal decade for crime: Crime rates for serious
crimes—a category including murder, drug traffick-
ing, aggravated assault, rape, and burglary—leveled
off during the decade, and by its end they had even
begun to decline. During the same period, however,
rates of incarceration increased dramatically. As a re-
sult, beginning in the 1980’s, the overall U.S. prison
population increased significantly. The stricter laws
being passed by state and federal legislatures in-
cluded many requiring longer sentences, as well as
mandatory sentences for some offenses and lower
rates of parole. These laws took more criminals off
the streets and kept them behind bars longer. In fed-
eral prisons alone, the number of inmates increased
by more than 140 percent between 1980 and 1989,
going from twenty-four thousand inmates to more
than fifty-eight thousand inmates.
These new laws were part of a concerted shift in
public policy away from rehabilitation and toward
incarceration simply as a way to remove convicted
criminals from the public sphere, so they could
not repeat their offenses. They were passed during a
decade when public concerns about crime rates mo-
tivated many politicians to claim that they were
“tough on crime.” President Ronald Reagan, for ex-
ample, mounted a Get Tough on Crime campaign in
1986 that resulted in the passage of mandatory mini-
mum sentences for drug trafficking. The law limited
the discretionary power of judges, mandating, for
instance, a sentence of no less than ten years for con-
victed first-time cocaine traffickers. As the decade
progressed, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
records indicated that the rate at which serious
crimes were being reported had started to decline.
Whether as a direct effect of the new laws or not, by
decade’s end there had been a net 20 percent de-
crease in violent crimes, a decrease for which “tough
on crime” programs received the credit.
Some disturbing trends emerged as a result of the
1980’s increase in incarceration. African Americans
came to represent a disproportionately large per-
centage of the prison population, especially the pop-
ulation serving time for drug-related offenses.
Critics of the public policies instituted in the 1980’s
tended to focus on this fact. African Americans
abused drugs at approximately the same rate as did
white Americans, but an African American drug
user was much more likely to be arrested than was a
white drug user. Moreover, an African American
who was arrested for a drug-related offense was
much more likely to be convicted than was a white262 Crime The Eighties in America