Black Lives Matter activist says 'the Clintons' passed policy that led to mass incarceration

[Playinghardball]

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton offered a glimpse of her approach to issues affecting African-Americans in a tense exchange with Black Lives Matter activists that was recorded and spread across social media.

Clinton told Boston-area organizers Julius Jones and Daunasia Yancey that she didn’t believe in "changing hearts" on issues of racial justice but in changing laws and reallocating resources instead.

Jones and Yancey expressed concern about Clinton’s remarks on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show the next week.

"She doesn’t actually feel like you can move this issue forward other than through policy," Jones said, "even though the policy mistakes that she and the Clintons made got us, in large degree, to the situation that we are in today with mass incarceration."

We wanted to see if Jones was right to blame the Clintons for the United States’ prison woes.

We reached out to Jones, who identifies himself as the founder of Black Lives Matter Worcester, and Black Lives Matter Boston to clarify what Jones meant, but we did not hear back from either source.

The underlying policy, however, is well-known. The question is how much it contributed to the growth of America’s prison population. As we'll see, the growth of the prison population started well before the federal law.

A ‘tough-on-crime environment’

As Jones suggests, the United States has the highest incarceration rate among developed nations, at around 700 prisoners per 100,000 people.

African-Americans in particular are locked up at disproportionate rates. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 37 percent of the 1.5 million men in state and federal prisons in 2013 were black, more than twice the percentage of their share of the population.

It wasn’t always this high; before 1975, the incarceration rate hovered around 200 prisoners.

Some of the growth had to do with Clinton policies, but experts said not all.

Crime policy during the 1970s and 1980s was driven by the "War on Drugs," an initiative launched by President Richard Nixon in 1971. Nixon famously called drug abuse "public enemy No. 1," which led to tougher sentencing and more arrests.

New York passed the nation’s first mandatory minimums for drug offenses in 1973, and Washington passed the first state-level truth-in-sentencing law in 1984. By 1987, five states had adopted sentencing guidelines for judges to follow.

President Bill Clinton took office in January 1993 touting a "tough-on-crime" agenda in response to an increase in violent crime and swelling homicide numbers. High-profile killings, such as the murder of Polly Klaas, followed later that year.

Bill Clinton was instrumental in the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Authored by then-Sen. Joe Biden, the sweeping crime bill provided $10 billion to fund new prisons, $6.1 billion for crime prevention and money for 100,000 new police officers.

It also enforced harsher sentencing in federal prisons and incentivized the creation of "truth-in-sentencing" laws at the state level. These laws require violent offenders to serve a minimum portion of their original sentence by ruling out the possibility of early parole. Under the bill, states that set this minimum at 85 percent of the sentence were granted funding for new prisons, and by 1998, 27 states and the District of Columbia had qualified.

The president took the final minutes of his first State of the Union to lobby for the bill. Hillary Clinton, too, campaigned for the legislation in speeches and interviews across the country.

The bill ultimately found wide support among Democrats and a handful of Republicans.

Just five years after the crime bill was passed, 29 states had truth-in-sentencing laws, and 24 had three strikes laws.

The bill’s effect

So did the crime bill lead to mass incarceration?

The Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit group that supports reducing the prison population, has tracked the massive expansion of people in federal, local and state prisons over the past century.


More here: http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/aug/25/julius-jones/black-lives-matter-activist-says-clintons-passed-p/

[840high]

1. kick

[Chakab]

2. Good. There needs to be an actual discussion about the consequences of the policies that the

Clintons have espoused over the years going into South Carolina.

THIS is what matters. Not the number of endorsements that she has from elected officials in the party, or superdelates that she has lined up or the affected speech that she uses in front of black audiences.

[Mufaddal]

3. Yeah, the bill was a Clinton keystone

(No pun intended)

However, their surrogates have hit back by pointing out Bernie voted for it. To my knowledge, this was because of the Violence Against Women Act provision, but I still wish he hadn't. He did, however, make his thoughts about it pretty clear.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

4. I don't know how Black voters can resonate with Hillary Clinton

She is a multimillionaire who is so far removed from the lives many Black people.