Midnight basketball

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Midnight basketball was a 1990s initiative to curb inner-city crime in the United States by keeping urban youth off the streets and engaging them with alternatives to drugs and crime.

In 1994, Bill Clinton pushed for an anti-crime bill that would lead to 100,000 more police officers as well as a number of programs intended to "deter crime where it starts" by providing "community activities like midnight basketball". [1] The plan was widely lampooned by conservatives such as House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich, who cited midnight basketball as an ineffective and wasteful use of federal funds.[2] Some, such as Rush Limbaugh, even called the proposal racist, given the largely African American populations targeted by the program. [3] However, midnight basketball was not a proposal unique to the Democrats— it was one of George H. W. Bush's "Thousand Points of Light". [4]