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发帖数: 2053 | 1 https://www.yahoo.com/politics/if-biden-runs-he-shouldnt-run-from-his-record
-on-128211958156.html
Sen. Joe Biden with Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell during
negotiations for the 1994 crime bill. (Photo: John Duricka/AP)
There was a time in Democratic politics when nothing mattered more than
being “tough on crime.” Think back to 1992, when Bill Clinton — mindful
of the way Michael Dukakis had been pilloried over prison furloughs and his
opposition to the death penalty four years earlier — took a hiatus from the
campaign trail so he could go back to Arkansas and preside over an
execution.
These days, though, it seems no Democrat can show enough mercy for the
criminal, especially if the crime is drug-related.
Joe Biden hasn’t yet entered the presidential field, and may not, but
already his authorship of the 1994 crime bill is under attack from “Black
Lives Matter” activists and liberal bloggers. Martin O’Malley has been
shouted down over his zero-tolerance policy as Baltimore’s mayor. Even
Hillary Clinton has backed away from her husband’s tough-on-crime record —
and, remarkably, so has he.
No one’s going to argue the nation hasn’t made serious mistakes in
criminal justice over the last 30 years. But the problem with much of this
criticism is that it lacks historical context and often some relevant facts.
There’s a complex and defensible record here for Biden and for the
candidates already in the race, if any of them can summon the courage to
defend it.
Let’s start with some history. Most of the sentencing laws that are now
widely considered in both parties to be nonsensical — and rightfully so —
date back to the 1970s. During the Reagan era, fearful that the president
was making them look soft on the issue (because he named a “drug czar” and
came up with the slogan “just say no,” and other wildly effective stuff
like that), Democrats in Congress — Biden key among them — passed three
separate laws establishing stricter minimum sentences for small-time drug
offenders.
Because cheap crack cocaine was the primary focus back then, those laws
created some unfair disparities between sentencing for crack (which was
mostly a poor person’s drug, affecting African-Americans disproportionately
) and powder cocaine (in which the white and wealthy indulged). It’s fair
to say they also gave rise to a predictable boom in the prison population
that would continue, unabated, for decades.
By the time Clinton was in office, however, the ill-conceived, 20-year war
on drugs was an obvious and colossal failure, and American cities were awash
in violence. If you didn’t experience that firsthand, it’s hard to
understand just how pervasive and destabilizing this was.
When I worked the night shift at the Boston Globe in the mid-’90s, it was
rare to go more than a few nights without chasing some shooting in one of a
handful of extraordinarily treacherous neighborhoods, and rare to go more
than a week without knocking on the door of a dead kid’s house. It affected
me deeply, as I’m sure it did a lot of other reporters and the cops we
covered.
There were 98 homicides in Boston in 1995, which also marked the 10th
consecutive year when murders in the United States exceeded the 20,000 mark.
And here’s the really critical thing that almost always gets overlooked
when you hear today’s activists indict the response to crime during this
time: the victims were overwhelmingly black and poor. So were the residents
who found themselves terrorized by the same bunch of kids on the same
wretched corners, day in and day out.
Ask yourself how Martin O’Malley, a white city councilman, got himself
elected in 1999 in a majority-black city, which was then one of the most
dangerous places to walk down the street in America. It’s because Baltimore
’s black residents, like the people I met every day in Boston, were tired
of cowering in their homes, and they hungered for the reforms that had
already improved safety in other big cities.
“If you can see it, and I can see it,” O’Malley repeatedly told voters,
“how come the police can see it and don’t do anything about it?” It
became a huge applause line.
No one can say with certainty how influential the 1994 crime bill, written
by Biden and signed into law by Bill Clinton, was in ultimately reversing
soaring crime rates. There are lots of theories about what caused crime to
decline, and probably most of them have some validity.
But here’s a fact: That particular law contained only one new provision for
a mandatory minimum sentence — the rule commonly known as “three strikes,
you’re out” — and it applied only if your last conviction was for a
second violent crime.
The law did offer grant money to states to build more prisons, if they
agreed to “truth in sentencing” laws that forced violent felons to serve
at least 85 percent of their time. But again, we’re talking about violent
felons (not pot smokers), and while the money created a new supply of prison
cells, the growing demand for those cells was chiefly the result of the
booming drug trade itself.
The 1994 law didn’t fix some of the wrongheaded policies of the 1980s, like
the disparities between sentencing for crack and cocaine; in that case,
political pressure trumped reason. What it did do, though, was to put 100,
000 new cops on American streets at a time when big-city mayors had begun to
appreciate the importance of having them there.
This was a huge deal, and you’d have to think it had at least something to
do with a roughly 35 percent drop in violent crime over the 10 years after
the law was passed. So did the data revolution in urban policing championed
by mayors like O’Malley.
Yes, there were unintended consequences and sometimes tragic missteps. As
the prison sentences piled up, so too did the lost years and broken families
, along with a sense of economic hopelessness. As the cops bore down on
communities, a kind of battle mentality set in.
William Bratton, now in his second stint as New York’s police commissioner,
once told me that political leaders — he was speaking specifically of Rudy
Giuliani — had been too slow to readjust their approach once the streets
were under control. The residents who had desperately needed more aggressive
policing became, all too often, the victims of it.
It’s hard to watch the video of, say, Eric Garner being slowly suffocated
to death by a horde of New York cops, for the crime of allegedly selling
cigarettes, and not come away feeling that zero-tolerance policing ought not
to be tolerated any longer.
But none of that should obscure the other, inescapable piece of a
complicated legacy, which is that a lot of people — mostly black and poor
— are alive today who would be dead if the rate of violent crime had stayed
on the trajectory it was on in 1994.
There’s really no reason that Biden or O’Malley shouldn’t be able to talk
about both sides of that legacy. You’d hope they could stand up to the
pressure from their own activists and say: I saw a crisis and tried to do
something bold about it, and some of what I did worked. And we can at least
have a conversation about the things that went right in the ’90s without
diminishing the importance of the things that went wrong.
The need for that conversation goes well beyond the current election. Murder
rates have been rising sharply again in some cities, and while everyone now
agrees that we need to find some more constructive ways of dealing with
drug crime, Democratic leaders can’t allow themselves to be drowned out by
the loudest and angriest voices in their party — those who would blame
everything on law enforcement and the legal system, and who would write off
street crime as trivial when compared with the crimes of an unjust society.
We have enough experience to know where that kind of mindset leads you in an
urbanized country. And the people who get crushed by it the most are the
very people for whom Democrats are supposed to speak. | T*********I
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