Tag: mass incarceration

Biden Tries To Gloss Over His Long History of Supporting the Drug War and Draconian Criminal Penalties

During his ABC “town hall” last night, responding to a question from moderator George Stephanopoulos, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden agreed that it was a “mistake” to “support” the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. At the same time, he defended parts of the law, including the Violence Against Women Act, funding to support “community policing” by hiring more officers, and the now-expired federal ban on “assault weapons.” He also implied that the real problem was not so much the law itself but the way that states responded to it. “The mistake came in terms of what the states did locally,” he said.

Both the question and the answer were highly misleading. First, Biden did not merely “support” the 1994 law; he wrote the damned thing, which he has proudly called “the 1994 Biden Crime Bill.” Second, as much as Biden might like to disavow the law’s penalty enhancements now that public opinion on criminal justice has shifted, he was proud of them at the time. Third, the 1994 crime bill is just one piece of legislation in Biden’s long history of supporting mindlessly punitive responses to drugs and crime.

Biden is trying to gloss over a major theme of his political career. “Every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress—every minor crime bill—has had the name of the Democratic senator from Delaware, Joe Biden,” he bragged in 1993. Now he wants us to believe his agenda was limited to domestic violence, community policing, and gun control.

“Things have changed drastically” since 1994, Biden said last night, noting that “the Black Caucus voted” for the crime bill, and “every black mayor supported it.” In other words, now that black politicians and Democrats generally have rejected the idea that criminal penalties can never be too severe, Biden has shifted with the winds of opinion. But as Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) noted during a Democratic presidential debate last year, that does not mean we should forget Biden’s leading role in the disastrous war on drugs and the draconian criminal justice policies that put more and more people in cages for longer and longer periods of time.

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Joe Biden is the enemy of BLM

Dennis and Deana Molla, who had draped “Trump 2020” flags on their home in Minneapolis, awoke Wednesday morning to find their garage and trucks ablaze and graffiti scrawled on the two doors of the garage. On one door was painted “BLM” over the circle-A anarchism symbol, and on the other “Biden 2020.” 

We have witnessed an unprecedented degree of political stupidity in recent months but the comedic contradictions make this case special.

Leaving aside the idea that anarchists would endorse a career politician to be head of state, it is impossible to logically reconcile support for the Black Lives Matter movement with an endorsement or even a vote for Joe Biden. For those who are passionately angry about the number of black people caged and killed by police in recent decades, Biden should in fact be the object of more scorn than any other politician, including Donald Trump. And yet many people holding a Black Lives Matter sign in one hand are holding a “Biden 2020” sign in the other.

It is now fairly well known that as Democratic Senator from Delaware, Biden was the author and principal proponent of what became the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which included an unprecedented expansion of mandatory minimum sentences, applied the death penalty to 60 crimes, and funded state prison construction and the hiring of 100,000 new police officers. Biden used the law to respond to the common — and erroneous — criticism that liberals were soft on crime:

Let me define the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties. That is what is in this bill. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties…. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells.

Four years after Biden’s crime bill became law, the number of people under correctional control was seven times greater than in  1970, and the black-to-white ratio for incarceration rates had risen from 3-to-1 to 6-to-1. The legions of police that were deployed into the streets by the federal law and the new responsibilities they were given to enforce drug laws and ever more “quality of life” laws — largely in Democrat-controlled cities — radically increased the number of encounters between police and the less-wealthy residents of those cities, with predictable results: there are now 2.3 million people incarcerated in American prisons and 1,000 civilians killed by police per year.

No one has done more to create the very conditions that the Black Lives Matter has organized itself against than Joe Biden.

And it doesn’t end in the US: if black lives matter, we should also consider Biden’s record overseas. Yet I have not seen any pictures of signs at Black Lives Matter protests denouncing the killing of black and brown lives in the ongoing U.S. wars in East Africa, Yemen, Syria, and—seemingly always—Iraq and Afghanistan, but if BLM protesters believed those non-white lives mattered as much as George Floyd’s or Jacob Blake’s they would consider Joe Biden to be a monster worse than Trump.

As chairman of the Foreign Relations committee in 2002 and 2003, Biden championed the invasion and occupation of Iraq and was deemed by the New Republic the Democrats’ “de facto spokesman on the war against terrorism.” He served as the Bush administration’s close ally in prosecuting the war, declaring in one hearing that the “weapons of mass destruction” alleged to be stockpiled in Iraq “must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power.”

As vice president, Biden was tasked with coming up with a strategy to maintain the intensity and breadth of the war on terror but with fewer U.S. boots on the ground. He proposed what he called “counterterrorism plus,” which ultimately became the Obama administration’s general approach to the wars in Africa and the Middle East. Biden helped invent what came to be known as the “Obama Doctrine” of increased “surgical” tactics, which involved sending in Special Forces on assassination missions and bombing suspected terrorists via drones. By the end of Obama and Biden’s two terms, the US military was bombing seven different Muslim-majority countries, killing hundreds of civilians — farmers, funerals, a wedding party, and even the sixteen-year-old American citizen Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, whose father had been assassinated by a drone two weeks earlier.

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From Mass Incarceration to Plan Colombia: Biden’s Role in the Failed War on Drugs

In an increasingly angry and bad faith campaign, Donald Trump and his team are presenting Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden as an anti-police radical controlled by the far left. Last week, the Trump campaign sent a text message to supporters warning them that Antifa would raid their homes if Biden wins in November. “They’ll disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door,” warned Florida congressman Matt Gaetz.

The reality, however, is that the 77-year-old former vice president has a long history of opposing progressive legislation and spearheading increasingly more draconian police, immigration, and criminal justice measures. Biden first shot to prominence in the 1970s, when, as a freshman senator, he became a leading voice against bussing, the practice of desegregating schools via public transport (something his now-running mate Kamala Harris grilled him on during the debates). He also maintained a close relationship with arch segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond, who left the Democratic party and became a Republican due to his vehement opposition to the Civil Rights Act. He even read the eulogy at Thurmond’s funeral, around the time of which it came out that Thurmond had fathered a child with a 15-16-year-old black servant girl working for him.

“Hang People for Jaywalking”

But Biden’s problematic history with race goes much further; the Delawarian has been one of the chief architects of the racist prison system we live under today. For decades, he pushed for more cops, more jails, more arrests, and more convictions, even criticizing the notorious Ronald Reagan for not locking enough people up.

Throughout the 1980s, he and Thurmond worked on a number of bills that radically reshaped the criminal justice system, including the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act which limited parole and cut sentence reductions for good behavior. Biden continued to attack Republican George H.W. Bush from the right on crime, in 1989, condemning his draconian proposals as not going far enough. “In a nutshell, the President’s plan does not include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time,” he said, later demanding to know why Bush hadn’t executed more drug dealers like he wanted.

Despite Bush pushing through substantial increases to the prison industrial system, Biden continually demanded more, publishing his own plans that included billions more in funding for increased numbers of police, FBI, and DEA agents.

This all culminated in what in 2007 he called his “greatest accomplishment” in politics: the controversial 1994 Crime Bill. Often labeled the “Biden Crime Bill” because of its author and chief promoter, the bill laid the basis for an ever-increasing prison population, introducing the death penalty for dozens of new offenses and spent billions on hundreds of thousands of extra police and prison cells. Just as Bill Clinton was making a point of returning to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a mentally handicapped black man, Biden was staking out his position as a new leader of the new, “tough on crime” Democrats, boasting that his bill meant that “we do everything but hang people for jaywalking.” As his biographer Branko Marcetic wrote, Biden makes Hillary Clinton look like [civil rights advocate] Michelle Alexander.

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