![]() These laws require violent offenders to serve a minimum portion of their original sentence by ruling out the possibility of early parole. It also enforced harsher sentencing in federal prisons and incentivized the creation of " truth-in-sentencing" laws at the state level. Joe Biden, the sweeping crime bill provided $10 billion to fund new prisons, $6.1 billion for crime prevention and money for 100,000 new police officers. High-profile killings, such as the murder of Polly Klaas, followed later that year.īill Clinton was instrumental in the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. President Bill Clinton took office in January 1993 touting a "tough-on-crime" agenda in response to an increase in violent crime and swelling homicide numbers. By 1987, five states had adopted sentencing guidelines for judges to follow. New York passed the nation’s first mandatory minimums for drug offenses in 1973, and Washington passed the first state-level truth-in-sentencing law in 1984. 1," which led to tougher sentencing and more arrests. Nixon famously called drug abuse "public enemy No. Some of the growth had to do with Clinton policies, but experts said not all.Ĭrime policy during the 1970s and 1980s was driven by the " War on Drugs," an initiative launched by President Richard Nixon in 1971. ![]() It wasn’t always this high before 1975, the incarceration rate hovered around 200 prisoners. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 37 percent of the 1.5 million men in state and federal prisons in 2013 were black, more than twice the percentage of their share of the population. The question is how much it contributed to the growth of America’s prison population. As we'll see, the growth of the prison population started well before the federal law.Īs Jones suggests, the United States has the highest incarceration rate among developed nations, at around 700 prisoners per 100,000 people.Īfrican-Americans in particular are locked up at disproportionate rates. The underlying policy, however, is well-known. We reached out to Jones, who identifies himself as the founder of Black Lives Matter Worcester, and Black Lives Matter Boston to clarify what Jones meant, but we did not hear back from either source. We wanted to see if Jones was right to blame the Clintons for the United States’ prison woes. ![]() "She doesn’t actually feel like you can move this issue forward other than through policy," Jones said, "even though the policy mistakes that she and the Clintons made got us, in large degree, to the situation that we are in today with mass incarceration." Jones and Yancey expressed concern about Clinton’s remarks on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show the next week. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton offered a glimpse of her approach to issues affecting African-Americans in a tense exchange with Black Lives Matter activists that was recorded and spread across social media.Ĭlinton told Boston-area organizers Julius Jones and Daunasia Yancey that she didn’t believe in "changing hearts" on issues of racial justice but in changing laws and reallocating resources instead. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |