The Political Dynamics of Justice Reform in The U.S.

from President George H.W. Bush to escalate the war on drugs. The plan, Biden said,
didn’t go far enough.
“Quite frankly, the president’s plan is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative
enough to meet the crisis at hand,” he said. He called not just for harsher punishments
for drug dealers but to “hold every drug user accountable.” Bush’s plan, Biden added,
“doesn’t include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, not enough
prosecutors to convict them, not enough judges to sentence them, and not enough
prison cells to put them away for a long time” — a direct call for more incarceration.
All of this reflected a broader movement in the Democratic Party to both address the
growing issue of crime and overcome successful Republican attacks about how
Democrats are “soft on crime.” This helps explain not just why Biden said and did all
these things, but why Bill Clinton signed the 1994 crime law and ran on its “tough on
crime” provisions — including his support for the “death penalty for drug
kingpins” — during his reelection bid in 1996.
Biden has repented for some of his past, acknowledging that creating extra punitive
penalties for crack was “a big mistake” and supporting efforts to reel back those
penalties. “I haven’t always been right,” Biden said earlier this year, speaking to
criminal justice issues. “I know we haven’t always gotten things right, but I’ve always
tried.”
That may not offer much comfort for criminal justice reformers. A big worry in the
criminal justice reform space is what would happen if, say, the crime rate started to rise
once again. If that were to happen, there could be pressure on lawmakers — and it’d at
least be easier for them — to go back to “tough on crime” views, framing more
aggressive policing and higher incarceration rates in a favorable way.
Given that the central progressive claim is that these policies are racist and, based on
the research, ineffective for fighting crime in the first place, any potential for backsliding
in this area once it becomes politically convenient is very alarming.
The concern, then, is what would happen if crime started to rise under President Biden:
Would he fall back on old “tough on crime” instincts, calling for harsh prison sentences
once again?
“[E]ven if Biden has subsequently learned the error of his ways,” Branko Marcetic wrote
for Jacobin, “the rank cynicism and callousness involved in his two-decade-long
championing of carceral policies should be more than enough to give anyone pause
about his qualities as a leader, let alone a progressive one.”
That’s what the debate over the 1994 crime law is about. It’s not just that Biden messed
up by helping write and supporting the law a quarter-century ago, but what his
involvement says about him today and in the future.
________
Page 92 of 262