During an interview with Buzzfeed's "Another Round" podcast, former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton gave her most definitive statements to date about the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the federal law that many black social justice activists cite as the catalyst for the discriminatory mass incarceration of black and brown people today.
Buzzfeed has a transcript up:
ANOTHER ROUND: I feel like what [Black Lives Matter activists] were looking for, and what a lot of black people are looking for, is for you and/or your husband to shoulder some responsibility in the crisis that we’re facing now. So, my question to you is do you ever look at the state of black America today — we can focus on the prison system for now — and regardless of what the intents were, and I know the ‘90s were a different time — times change, legislation changes, needs change — but regardless of your intent, do you ever look at the state of black America and think, “Wow, we really fucked this up for black people”?
HILLARY CLINTON: I’ll tell you what I think, and my husband has spoken to this, he spoke about this at the NAACP just last summer — you always have to learn from what you do. I was interviewed by Al Sharpton the other day, and I’ve known him a long time, because I represented New York, and he said, and I think it’s good to be reminded of this, that in the ‘90s, and particularly when my husband became president, there was a great demand, not just from America at large, but from the black community, to get tougher on crime. And Al Sharpton said this, he said, I was one of the people who was asking that we get tougher on crime and that we clean up our neighborhoods and we stop gangs from killing each other. And he said, I was going around boarding up crack houses, and so we can’t go back and say we didn’t ask that a lot of this be done, because we did. I think what’s important is you take stock of what was done and you figure out what needs to change and what we have seen over the course of now a number of years is that too many low-level offenders, too many nonviolent offenders ended up in prison, and that became a terrible strain and drain on the African-American community, because too many, again, predominantly, not exclusively, men, were ending up incarcerated.
So I think what my husband said when he spoke to the NAACP was: Look, we’ve learned a lot, and took responsibility for whatever the impact of the legislation, but also being reminded that there were reasons that that legislation was passed and very strongly supported across communities of color and everybody else. In a democracy, you’re supposed to keep being a learning political system, and now we have to say to ourselves, as people are, hey, maybe there were some good intentions, but those intentions had unintended consequences, and we’ve got to deal with those consequences. But it’s not enough, in my opinion, as some on the Republican side are saying, let’s just change the sentencing and all that — I’m for all that, but let’s also provide more supports in the community. Let’s also make sure that people who are diverted from the criminal justice system have a real chance to get the services and support they need to build their lives. So, this has now I think got to be a broader conversation than just, you know, change the sentencing and move low-level offenders out of the prisons, because that has to be done, but that’s not enough.
My offhand reaction is that on one hand, Clinton is correct that there
were many in the black community that did desire some of the "get-tough-on-crime" measures (I don't know if I would describe it as a "great demand" on the part of the black community), as any look at the
roll call votes will attest.
On the other hand, Clinton still seems unwilling to acknowledge the license that the 1994 crime bill gave to state and local law enforcement to crack down on all manner of things, especially non-violent offenders.
Clinton also discussed some changes that she might propose to such things as sentencing guidelines (the story notes that Clinton had talked about these things in 2008, as well.)
I have been doing some research on-and-off about that 1994 crime bill and I do agree, to an extent, with Clinton that the 1994 crime bill was a bill for its' time. The question is, given that we now know that the bill went too far, what do the 2016 presidential candidates propose to do about it?