3 Strikes for Ronnie’s Kids and, Now, Bill’s : Today’s violent young men grew up in cities devastated by callous government policies.

In a stirring portion of his State of the Union address, President Clinton spoke of a generation of violent youngsters in America’s toughest neighborhoods consigned to live in a “vast vacuum filled by violence, drugs and gangs.” In their eagerness to lock up these young people and their older brothers forever after giving them “three strikes,” none of our newly tough-on-crime political leaders have bothered to talk about where these kids came from, or how the vacuum in which they live was created.

They were born 13 years to the day before Clinton’s speech, when another freshman President presented his vision of the decade ahead. Ronald Reagan’s vision was one in which “big government” was not only taken off the backs of the people, but also taken out of the inner cities. Job training programs were cut back, monies for neighborhood recreation centers and teen counselors were withdrawn, summer programs for inner-city kids were canceled and funding for drug counseling, rehab centers and other programs dried up as government learned how to “just say no” to poor people.

But there was more. The Reagan Administration limited the pursuit of class-action lawsuits whose outcomes might benefit whole communities of poor people rather than just individual litigants. Under the stewardship of a man who later was rewarded with an appointment to the Supreme Court, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission turned its back on thousands to whom equal opportunity or fair treatment had been denied.

Criminologists worried about the long-term consequences of these policies and predicted that ripping away the safety net from poor and minority communities would leave nothing but a social and economic wasteland, precisely the sort of place that would serve as a breeding ground for crime among those people whose lives were just beginning. We worried, too, about the consequences of increased incarceration on these communities. What would happen to the growing number of families whose men were taken off to prison, warehoused for unprecedented periods of time, learning little more than cynicism, hatred and hopelessness?

One of the very few things “big government” did with enthusiasm during the Reagan and Bush years was incarcerate young minority citizens. Most people now know that there are more young African American men behind bars than in college.

No one has said much about the impact of these policies, already the harshest punishments ever seen in the history of modern corrections, on the breakdown of community and family in the inner cities. As President Clinton ponders the whereabouts of absent fathers in these neighborhoods, he need look no further than in the scores of already overcrowded prisons built by his predecessors.

Children born at the dawn of this new era are just now coming of age. These are “Ronnie’s Kids”: They owe their cynicism, hopelessness and anger to the same President whose heartless social policies created the “vast vacuum” in which they were left to mature. They are coming of age in time to frighten conservative and liberal politicians and to face the Draconian “three strikes” legislation that has become the test of every politician’s criminal-justice manhood. President Clinton’s recent afterthought that perhaps “every offense in the world” shouldn’t be included only illustrates how badly and bizarrely this discussion has been skewed. Indeed, if all the proposed legislation passes, many of these children will have their first strike by age 14 or 15 (just a little older than the President’s own daughter), and surely many will achieve their third by their 18th birthdays. Having lived the first part of their lives in the vacuum created by the actions of one President, they will be condemned to live the remainder inside the walls of a gulag made possible by another.

Perhaps it is also Reagan’s legacy that we seem to have become a country more comfortable spending vast sums of money to hurt certain of our citizens rather than to help them. Although no one could ask for clearer evidence of the futility of exclusively punishment-oriented policies than the youthful violence that plagues us now, President Clinton seems hellbent on repeating this tragic and destructive example. If he persists, 13 years from now there will be another generation of rootless, desperately angry and frightening young people that some new President will struggle to control. These will be “Bill’s Kids.” The only difference is that there will be many more of them, and they will be much, much angrier.