And Throw Away The Key!

Yesterday, in the post about polls, we saw how 45% of Democrats say they are more likely to vote for Biden in the primary because of "his role in passing sweeping crime legislation during the 1990s." Presumably they are unaware of the controversy around the horrible legislation Biden wrote in the '90s. I'm sure he'd like to keep it that was but, as part of his pathetic campaign/apology tour, he has gone back and further-- depending on the color of the audience he's speaking to-- from saying "oops; I made a boo-boo" to saying "lock 'em up, muthafucka!"

Yesterday, Holmes Lybrand did a little fact-checking on Biden, a nortorious and uncontrollable lair. Let me interject here that PolitiFact has been fact-checking Biden forever and they have found that half the stuff he says are lies or partial lies. That's intolerable, although it's with pointing out in passing that there is a worse liar-- a much worse liar-- than Biden: Trump who has lied in over 84% of the public statements he's made that were fact-checked by PolitiFact.

On Tuesday, Biden was lying to an audience of Democratic primary voters in Nashua, New Hampshire. When asked about his 1994 crime bill and how it seemed to target minority communities living in poverty for mass incarceration, Biden got all self-righteous and indignant: "Folks, let's get something straight. This idea that the crime bill generated mass incarceration-- it did not generate mass incarceration." That's pure and very typical-- and oft-repeated-- Biden lie on a Trumpian scale of gaslighting.

Here are some facts and figures Biden always overlooks: "Following passage of the 1994 crime bill, incarceration rates in the U.S. continued to rise for more than a decade. Experts however say it's hard to determine how much of this increase came as a result of the 1994 bill, since incarceration rates had been steadily rising since the early 1970s. From 1973 to 2009, the incarceration rate in the U.S. more than quadrupled, from 161 people to 767 per 100,000 nationwide, according to a study by the National Research Council. It's hard to pin that trend on one particular piece of legislation."

One of the largest crime bills ever passed, 1994's Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act strengthened law enforcement across the country, providing federal money for new cops and prisons, as well as tightening up federal sentencing guidelines. It included a federal "three strike" provision mandating life imprisonment for certain felons convicted of violent crimes, and expanded the death penalty to include 60 additional crimes. The bill also included a ban on 18 different types of semiautomatic assault weapons for the next decade.

At the Nashua event on Tuesday, Biden argued that federal prisoners make up a small share of the total prison population in the US-- which is true. Federal prisoners account for roughly 10% of the total number of people incarcerated in the US.

The point Biden appeared to be making was that the 1994 bill couldn't have created or greatly attributed to mass incarceration, since it only applied to violations of federal law, not state crimes.

But that misses the broader impact that federal policy can have on the way that states incarcerate, including the influence of federal money. As a report from the Brennan Center notes, the 1994 crime bill "provided funding for 100,000 new police officers and $14 billion in grants for community-oriented policing, for example."

"It is fair to say that the trajectory of increased incarceration had already begun before the 1994 crime bill," Kara Gotsch, director of strategic initiatives at the Sentencing Project, told CNN Tuesday before noting that the way Congress and the President "influence state policy is through money."

The 1994 crime bill tried to do just that in offering grants for new prisons to states who imposed truth-in-sentencing (TIS) policies, which impose mandatory minimums for time served.

Initially, the crime bill required states to pass laws mandating violent offenders serve at least 85% of their sentence before those states could receive TIS grant funds.

Even still, the influence of these federal funds shouldn't be overstated. The data is murky on how much the federal grants influenced how states make decisions on sentencing policy.

For example, a study from the Urban Institute found that out of the 16 states that changed their TIS laws following the 1994 crime bill and that qualified for federal TIS funding, "the changes were often influenced more by ongoing state reform processes rather than the federal incentive grant program."

The study says that states were already imposing their own minimum sentencing laws before the 1994 crime bill, and at most the bill "may have contributed to modest changes in sentencing structure" for a small number of states.

"The impact was as much rhetorical," said Bertram "as it was a bill that increased the number of people in prison."

Bernie was in the House when Biden had joined other conservatives to crack down on crime-- and Bernie was preaching for a different approach, one that wasn't based on mass incarceration. Bernie's positions are popular today... but they weren't in the '90s. Bernie famously explained how the ghastly, punitive crime bill in 1991 was not about preventing crime but about retribution, vengeance and punishment. On the House floor: "What we’re discussing now is an issue where some of our friends are saying we’re not getting tough enough on the criminals. But my friends, we have the highest percentage of people in America in jail per capita of any industrialized nation on Earth. We’ve beaten South Africa. We’ve beaten the Soviet Union. What do we have to do, put half the country behind bars?"

He's always been advocating for policies aimed to get to the root causes of crime. He was ahead of his time-- way ahead:

It is my firm belief that clearly there are people in our society who are horribly violent, who are deeply sick and sociopathic, and clearly these people must be put behind bars in order to protect society from them.

But it is also my view that through the neglect of our government and through a grossly irrational set of priorities, we are dooming today tens of millions of young people to a future of bitterness, misery, hopelessness, drugs, crime, and violence. And, Mr. Speaker, all the jails in the world-- and we already imprison more people per capita than any other country-- and all of the executions… in the world will not make that situation right.

We can either educate or electrocute. We can create meaningful jobs, rebuilding our society, or we can build more jails. Mr. Speaker, let us create a society of hope and compassion, not one of hate and vengeance.