It really should have come as no surprise when Attorney General William Barr interfered politically in the sentencing of Donald Trump associate Roger Stone. The Attorney General has a long track-record of practically asking how high when the president he serves requests he jumps, starting with his first attempt at Attorney General from 1991 to 1993, during former President George H.W. Bush’s tenure. In what has also become part of his MO, Barr all but forewarned the country of his shoddy work to come during his Senate confirmation hearing in 1991. During the hearing, he touted Bush-era “tough on crime” policies that would shape the climate leading to mass incarceration of black and brown people for decades to come.
Former Sen. Strom Thurmond asked Barr at the hearing what can be done “to address the crime problems today in this country.” After a lengthy ode to fighting the Crips and Bloods, Barr promoted Bush’s blatantly racist approach to anti-crime policy and ignored the very force that allowed for the crack epidemic of the 1980s—a blind eye from his former employer, the CIA. “I think also we have to focus on strengthening the criminal justice system itself,” Barr said at his 1991 confirmation hearing. “We've done a lot in the federal system during the '80s, and the federal system is shaping up as a fairly good system, although we think we have some unfinished business -- that's what the President's crime bill is all about, so there are some things we can still do at the federal level, but I think states should start following suit.”
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And by following suit, Barr apparently meant ignoring government culpability. It wasn’t until 1998 that The New York Times obtained a declassified report in which the CIA's inspector general admitted the agency failed to look into drug trafficking in the 1980s. The CIA ''did not inform Congress of all allegations or information it received indicating that contra-related organizations or individuals were involved in drug trafficking,” the CIA’s inspector general reportedly wrote.
It’s no coincidence that in order to lead policies harming black people the senior Bush relied on a stereotypical image of a black man taking advantage of a white woman’s innocence. He used Willie Horton, a black Massachusetts prisoner who while released through a furlough program raped a white woman and stabbed her boyfriend, as the face of crime even though a Bureau of Justice Statistics report in 1997 showed that six in 10 rapists were white. Arrest, conviction, and prison admissions data also point to a sex offender who is “more likely to be white than other violent offenders,” according to the report.
Barr, much like the elder Bush he championed, has proven himself more than fluent in denials of racist policies over the years. "During your previous tenure as Attorney General, you literally wrote the book on mass incarceration, or at least wrote this report ‘The Case for More Incarceration,’" Sen. Cory Booker told Barr during his more recent Senate confirmation hearing in January 2019. "You argue that we as a nation were 'incarcerating too few criminals.'" With no denial from Barr regarding his earlier work, Booker also cited a statement that the prospective Attorney General made, claiming “there’s no statistical evidence of racism in the criminal justice system.” Barr again stood by his statement and explained that while “there's no doubt” that racism exists, ”overall, I thought that as a system, it's working.” “It does not, it's not predicated on racism," he said.
Only a white person can afford to be so naive, with one out of every three black boys and one in six Latino boys likely to end up in prison, according to statistics the American Civil Liberties Union cited. That’s compared to one in every 17 white boys. While some would sooner argue there’s something inherently bad about black people to account for the difference, those who know better point to a clear systematic failure.