Midnight basketball

Midnight basketball was a 1990's 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, who considered midnight basketball an ineffective and wasteful use of federal funds. However, midnight basketball was not a proposal unique to the Democrats— it was one of George H. W. Bush's "Thousand Points of Light". [2]