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Joe Biden Has One Of The Most Punitive, Tough-On-Crime Records In The 2020 Field

Joe Biden Has One Of The Most Punitive, Tough-On-Crime Records In The 2020 Field

Joe Biden
Former vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden listens to a patron at a Mexican restaurant Wednesday, May 8, 2019, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Will Joe Biden’s helping lead America’s war on drugs during the 1980s and ’90s come back to bite him during in 2020 presidential campaign. Biden has a long record of supporting not only the war on drugs but also mass incarceration.

Biden, 76, “spent years leading the charge on policies escalating mass incarceration and the war on drugs — policies that much of the Democratic Party now strongly opposes,” Vox reported.

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Now currently leading the polls for the 2020 presidential race, Biden’s past — from his harsh questioning of Anita Hill to inappropriate touching allegations to his staunch anti-crime stance — has come under scrutiny and has raised questions for some.

“When it comes to criminal justice issues, Biden’s record also puts him at sharp odds with where Democrats are today: He has one of the most punitive, ‘tough on crime’ records on criminal justice issues within the 2020 field — more so than even opponents Kamala Harris or Amy Klobuchar, both of whom have already been criticized for their records,” Vox reported.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Biden headed the Senate Judiciary Committee and he wrote many of the laws that have led to a punitive criminal justice system. “That included measures that enacted more incarceration, more prisons, and tougher prison sentences for drug offenses, particularly crack cocaine. However, Biden has backtracked since the 1980s and 1990s. Before he left the Senate to become vice president, he pushed  to lower tougher prison sentences for crack cocaine — an effort that helped lead to a law that President Barack Obama signed in 2010,” the Crime Report reported.

“There’s a tendency now to talk about Joe Biden as the sort of affable if inappropriate uncle, as loudmouth and silly,” Naomi Murakawa, author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, told the Marshall Project in 2015. “But he’s actually done really deeply disturbing, dangerous reforms that have made the criminal justice system more lethal and just bigger.”