Tag: 1994 crime bill
The (Prison) Education Of Joe Biden

The (Prison) Education Of Joe Biden

December is the month when we revisit the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a stony-hearted man who finally learns to be more generous and humane. That tale may strike home in the Oval Office, because Joe Biden sometimes resembles the reformed Scrooge in trying to make up for his past harshness.

Biden was the chief author of the 1994 crime bill, which was part of a broad push to increase penalties for lawbreakers. That measure contributed to the mass incarceration boom of the 1990s. At the same time, the law took away one important method of keeping inmates released from prison from returning to prison.

In Congress, tough-on-crime politicians raged against the practice of providing federal college funds known as Pell Grants to prisoners who wanted to pursue higher education. Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), portrayed the expense as a waste and an injustice: "Citizens who are struggling to meet their children's skyrocketing tuition costs have a right to be outraged when the child of a police officer in their community can't get a Pell grant but a criminal the police officer sends to prison can."

In fact, giving grants to inmates didn't reduce the funds available to their students. But no matter. The Biden crime bill, proudly signed by Bill Clinton, zeroed out Pell Grants for prison inmates. Better, apparently, that they should spend their time making license plates and pumping iron than solving equations and writing term papers.

Biden has since expressed remorse for his role in passing the crime bill, which he described as "a big mistake." The provision on Pell Grants certainly was. It's hard to think of a policy more self-defeating than preventing prisoners from using their time behind bars to discipline their minds and acquire useful knowledge.

Under Barack Obama, the Education Department found a way to offer such financial aid through an experimental initiative called Second Chance Pell. The department expanded the program under Donald Trump, who also signed legislation repealing the ban on Pell Grants for incarcerated students.

The change, tucked into the $900 billion pandemic relief package approved last December, won't take effect until 2023. In the meantime, the Biden administration has expanded Second Chance to cover some 200 colleges, up from 131 today. Thanks to separate legislation, inmates will also get more access to vocational training programs, such as carpentry and masonry.

These changes will sound like gross extravagance to anyone who thinks incarceration should maximize the misery of criminals. The problem with that approach is that 95 percent of those in prison today will return to our midst — having been changed, for better or worse, by their time behind bars.

Law-abiding citizens will be safer if former inmates have credentials that make them employable, giving them a good alternative to robbing convenience stores or dealing drugs.

"The cost-benefit of this does not take a math genius to figure out," then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in 2015, launching the Second Chance Pell program. "We lock folks up here, $35-40,000 every single year. A Pell Grant is less than $6,000 each year." That $35-40,000, of course, does not include the cost of the harm done to innocent people by freed inmates who revert to crime.

Education is a reliable way to curb recidivism. A study by the Vera Institute of Justice found that prisoners who take post-secondary courses are 48 percent less likely to return to prison than those who don't — saving five dollars for every dollar invested. They are more likely to find jobs after their release.

It also noted, "Prisons with postsecondary education programs have fewer violent incidents than prisons without them, creating safer working conditions for staff and safer living environments for incarcerated people."

Employers may also profit from these programs. In the tight labor market, more businesses are willing to consider applicants they once would have rejected out of hand. Honest Jobs, which helps people with criminal records, "had 158 companies register for its site from May to July, roughly doubling its ranks of active employers," reports Bloomberg. "New York City-based nonprofit Fortune Society says placements in April through June were up 14 percent from the same period last year."

The worst prisons are fully capable of exacting retribution against their occupants. But correctional institutions are far more valuable if they can also give inmates the means to live law-abiding lives once they have paid their debt to society.

Every felon who leaves prison gets a second chance. The question is: a second chance to do what?

Follow Steve Chapman on Twitter @SteveChapman13 or at https://www.facebook.com/stevechapman13. To find out more about Steve Chapman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Wrong On Crime? Many Black Americans Agreed With Biden

Wrong On Crime? Many Black Americans Agreed With Biden

Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and other Democratic presidential candidates believe that Joe Biden was wrong in helping to craft and pass the 1994 crime bill, which they blame for the damage it wrought among African Americans.

They have a point. What they fail to grasp is that if they had been senators then, they likely would have been wrong right along with him.

It’s easy in retrospect to see that the legislation was deeply flawed. In fact, it was not impossible to see it even then. I wrote columns at the time criticizing the bill for expanding death penalty crimes, mandating life sentences for repeat offenders (“three strikes and you’re out”) and locking up more criminals for longer periods.

The increase in incarceration that occurred in the 1990s did have a lopsided racial impact. But it was not the product of the crime bill, because the vast majority of felons are prosecuted and imprisoned under state laws. The federal crackdown played only a minor role.

“The proud architect of a failed system is not the right person to fix it,” declares Booker. Most of the provisions in the 1994 bill, however, have already been “fixed,” by expiration or repeal.

The people who opposed the bill had the better of the argument. But to understand the legislation and its broad support in Congress, you have to understand the frightening climate in which it was passed.

Between 1983 and 1992, the violent crime rate jumped by 41 percent. New York City had 2,245 murders in 1990, or more than six per day. Chicago had 943 murders in 1992. (By comparison, New York had 289 homicides last year, and Chicago had 572.) The crack epidemic was in full, terrifying swing.

Americans were keenly aware of the growing danger, and they wanted something done about it — whatever it took to make them safer. There was “a fabulously intemperate and angry mood among Americans,” recalls Franklin Zimring, a criminologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Politicians had to respond.

The crime bill was one response to that mood. It was a big package, including not only the provisions I mentioned before but also money to add 100,000 police nationwide, a ban on “assault weapons,” and inducements for states to lengthen prison terms (“truth in sentencing”). It adopted many Republican policies while helping Democrats shed their soft-on-crime label.

At the time, the racial politics were not quite what you might assume. Prior to becoming mayor of Atlanta in 1990, Maynard Jackson offered a plan to confiscate the property of drug dealers called “Kick Their Assets.”

As for murderers, Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry wanted police to “hunt them down like mad dogs.” Black leaders like these wanted stern action because it was African Americans who were most likely to be harmed by crime.

“At the height of the epidemic, black political and civic leaders often compared crack to the greatest evils that African Americans had ever suffered,” Yale Law professor James Forman Jr., who is black, wrote in his 2017 book Locking Up Our Own. One NAACP official called it “the worst thing to hit us since slavery.”

In his 1997 book, Race, Crime and the Law, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, an African American, argued that “blacks have suffered more from being left unprotected or under-protected by law enforcement authorities than from being mistreated as suspects or defendants.”

In many black neighborhoods, one thing scarier than having police around is not having them. The crime bill provided more of them.

Whites who favored punitive action may have been motivated partly by racial prejudice. But black sentiment also helped to produce these policies.

A 1994 Gallup survey found that 58 percent of African Americans supported the crime bill — compared with 49 percent of whites. The only black senator, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, supported it. Of the 40 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, just 12 voted against it.

It may seem plausible that black Americans would blame Biden for his role in bringing about the incarceration of so many of their brethren. But that assumes they actually object to this outcome. In a 2014 poll by the Sentencing Project, 64 percent of them said that courts were too lenient in punishing criminals.

A generation ago, Biden made his share of mistakes when it came to fighting crime. If they had been in his place, would Booker or Harris have done better? I wouldn’t bet on it.

Bill Clinton’s ‘I Almost Want To Apologize,’ Doesn’t Cut It

Bill Clinton’s ‘I Almost Want To Apologize,’ Doesn’t Cut It

By the next day, Bill Clinton was feeling remorse. Almost.

“Now I like and believe in protests,” he explained to an audience at Penn State Behrend. “But I never thought I should drown anybody else out. … So I did something yesterday in Philadelphia. I almost want to apologize for it, but I want to use it as an example of the danger threatening our country.”

That danger, said the former president, is the inability to have respectful discussions with those with whom we disagree. “We’ve got to stop that in this country,” he said. “We’ve got to listen to each other again.”

The reference was to an incident Thursday wherein the 42nd president, while campaigning to help his wife Hillary become the 45th, got into a shouting match with Black Lives Matter activists in Philadelphia. Had this been a Trump rally, the protesters would have been beaten up, so we can at least be thankful the incident ended without stitches or icepacks.

Not to say it wasn’t ugly. In a sometimes angry exchange, Clinton defended himself against hecklers’ charges that the crime bill he signed in 1994, with its harsher sentencing, new prison construction, three strikes rule and revocation of education grants for inmates, helped fuel the mass incarceration crisis that has decimated the African-American community.

That’s nothing but true, as Clinton himself acknowledged in a speech last summer before the NAACP. “I signed a bill that made the problem worse,” he said. “And I want to admit it.”

He should have stuck with that. Thursday’s confrontation was light on contrition and long on finger wagging. Clinton reminded protesters that the bill in question was signed in an era of lurid headlines about gangs shooting children. “You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter,” he shouted.

He credited the bill with dropping the nation’s crime rate to historic lows, which is a dubious claim. As PolitiFact has since observed, the crime rate was already falling when the bill was enacted.

Clinton also noted that the bill was passed with the support of at least some African-American leaders. That part, at least, is true; it was also supported by his wife and her chief rival, Bernie Sanders. Even so, it would be naive to believe opportunism did not play a part in Clinton’s signing the bill. After all, it gave him the perfect retort to Republicans who accused him of being “soft on crime.”

Now, 22 years later, the bill is back in the news and the ex-president wants to use an argument about it as an example of political incivility? Yes, that is a gnawing concern. But if Clinton thinks it’s the key takeaway from last week’s confrontation, he is missing the point. It is immaterial whether he and those protesters ever apologize for talking over one another.

Who’s going to apologize for all the nonviolent African-American offenders who have lost decades of their lives behind bars while white offenders who had the same records and committed the same crimes went free? Or for children sentenced to live in motherless homes and eat at fatherless tables? Or for the fact that the land of the free now has the highest incarceration rate on Earth?

Who will apologize that a community already withstanding high rates of poverty, unemployment and neglect has been hollowed out by an ill-conceived law?

Who will apologize? More importantly, who will work to change it?

That’s the question for which African Americans and all voters who care about justice must demand answers. “I almost want to apologize,” doesn’t cut it. It’s weaselly and ultimately, it’s not even on topic. If he truly desires to be forthright and to engage the people his crime bill has injured, then what the ex-president needs to say should be obvious:

“I passed a bad law. Here’s how Hillary will fix it.”

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

(c) 2016 THE MIAMI HERALD DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Photo: Former U.S. President Bill Clinton (L-R) campaigns for his wife Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as she rallies with supporters at an outdoor plaza in Columbia, South Carolina February 26, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Let’s Look At The Crime Bill

Let’s Look At The Crime Bill

Watching Bill Clinton bickering with Black Lives Matter activists in Philadelphia recently, I had several conflicting, and not entirely praiseworthy responses. One was that the longer an American political campaign continues, the dumber and uglier it gets.

Another was, why bother? People holding up signs saying “Hillary is a Murderer” aren’t there for dialogue. The charge is so absurd it’s self-refuting. Certainly nobody in the audience was buying.

That woman who shouted that Bill Clinton should be charged with crimes against humanity? He probably should have let it go. Bickering over a 1994 crime bill has little political salience in 2016, particularly since Hillary’s opponent, the sainted Bernie Sanders, actually voted for the damn thing. She didn’t.

Instead, Clinton briefly lost his cool. The next day, he said he “almost” wanted to apologize, which strikes me as slicing the bologna awfully thin even for him.

You’ve probably seen the ten-second clip on TV. “I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out on the street to murder other African-American children,” Clinton said angrily. “Maybe you thought they were good citizens, [Hillary] didn’t. You are defending the people who killed the people whose lives you say matter! Tell the truth. You are defending the people who caused young people to go out and take guns.”

Many Democratic-oriented pundits found this shocking. Evidently political journalism is where Freudianism—or Maureen Dowdism anyway—has gone to die. Even as astute an observer as Slate’s Michelle Goldberg went all psychoanalytical on Clinton.

“It is somehow only when he is working on his wife’s behalf that he veers into sabotage,” she wrote. “What is needed here is probably a shrink…Either he doesn’t want her to overtake him, or he doesn’t want her to repudiate him. Regardless, Hillary should shut him down. She can’t divorce him, but she can fire him.”

Fat chance. Anyway, who says the outburst hurt her? Sure Bill Clinton can get hot defending his wife. I suspect more voters find that admirable than not.

It’s also unclear whom Clinton’s tantrum offended. “If you read some intellectuals on the left, they’d suggest there should be a grudge against the Clintons,” Michael Fortner, a professor of urban studies at the City University of New York told the Christian Science Monitor “but I think the primary results show there isn’t a grudge at all.”

Fortner, author of the book “Black Silent Majority,” argues that contrary to Black Lives Matter, many in the African-American community understand that the tough-on-crime aspects of the 1994 law weren’t foisted upon them by white racists. Devastated by a veritable Tsunami of violence and gang warfare, “political leaders, mayors, and pastors played an important role in pushing for these policies.”

In Little Rock, where I lived, it was common to hear fusillades of gunfire in black neighborhoods at night. During Clinton’s first term, the city’s homicide rate was nearly triple today’s—the vast majority of victims young black men. Teenagers I coached on Boys Club basketball teams needed to be careful what color clothing they wore en route to practice. People got shot to death for wearing Crips blue in Bloods neighborhoods.

Businesses closed, jobs dried up; anybody with the means to get out, got out. Including, one suspects, the parents of some Black Lives Matter activists. There’s a reason two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus joined Bernie Sanders in supporting the 1994 legislation.

Clinton told them about all that, along with a recitation of the bill’s Democratic virtues: a (since rescinded) assault-weapons ban, the Violence Against Women Act, 100,000 new cops on the beat. Then he made some probably insupportable claims about the crime bill’s good effects:

“A 25-year low in crime, a 33-year low in the murder rate—and listen to this, because of that and the background-check law, a 46-year low in the deaths of people from gun violence. And who do you think those lives were, that mattered? Whose lives were saved, that mattered?”

But then it’s also a stretch to say the bill’s responsible for America having more citizens in prison than Russia and Iran. Eighty-seven percent are in state penitentiaries, not federal lockups. Fifty-three percent of those for violent crimes. Those numbers Clinton didn’t dwell upon, although he did in a speech last year. “The bad news,” he said “is we had a lot of people who were locked up, who were minor actors, for way too long.”

Hillary Clinton herself has regretted resorting—one time, 20 years ago—to a comic-book term like “super-predators” to describe drug gang members.

Lost in all the hubbub was Bill Clinton taking the protesters seriously enough to engage them about what the dread “triangulation” really signifies. It’s not an ideological label, but a philosophical inclination: doing what you can, when you can, while recognizing that the job is never done.

Photo: Former U.S. President Bill Clinton (C) greets customers and employees while campaigning for his wife, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, at the NewBo Market in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in this January 7, 2016 file photo. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein/Files