As a 2020 presidential candidate, Joe Biden is now trying to distance himself from a 1994 crime bill he authored.
On the campaign trail the issue of the bill and Biden’s past as being “tough on crime,” which disproportionately affected Black and brown people, has become a sore spot for Biden.
“If you ask some criminal justice reform activists, the 1994 crime law passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton, which was meant to reverse decades of rising crime, was one of the key contributors to mass incarceration in the 1990s. They say it led to more prison sentences, more prison cells, and more aggressive policing — especially hurting Black and brown Americans, who are disproportionately likely to be incarcerated,” Vox reported.
But when the topic comes up, Biden argues that the bill didn’t have much impact on incarceration though in 2016, Biden defended the law proudly saying “restored American cities” during a high crime era.
He boasted: “As a matter of fact, I drafted the bill, if you remember.”
The bill was called the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, now known as the 1994 crime law. Biden put years of work into writing it. At the time, Biden oversaw the Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill was touted as a way to deal with rising crime, particularly violent crime, in America (the crack cocaine epidemic was partially to blame for the increase in crime).
“The law imposed tougher prison sentences at the federal level and encouraged states to do the same. It provided funds for states to build more prisons, aimed to fund 100,000 more cops, and backed grant programs that encouraged police officers to carry out more drug-related arrests — an escalation of the war on drugs,” Vox reported.
After the law was passed, Biden bragged about it.
There were some parts of the bill that people do praise today, such as the Violence Against Women Act which cracked down on domestic violence and rape; the provision to fund background checks for guns; as well as the law that “
But most recently Biden backed away from the bill, saying he got stuck writing it. “Biden apologized in January for portions of his anti-crime legislation, but he has largely tried to play down his involvement, saying in April that he “got stuck with” shepherding the bills because he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee,” the New York Times reported.
Not many are buying that. In fact, someone tweeted: “Joe Biden says he “got stuck with” writing the crime bills. Not true. Our deep dive into how, as early as ’77, he made the expansion of the prison population an explicit legislative goal
