The superpredator moral panic drove mass incarceration of young Black people.

Evidence

The moral panic drove public policy as local, state, and federal governments began to imprison young black men and women at alarming rates. (Black women, for example, had the fastest-growing incarceration rates in the 1990s.) Black children weren’t treated like children—they were increasingly tried in courts as adults. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 213