In American politics, few people admit mistakes. They are made—and made in excess—but hearing a politician admit a political mistake just doesn't happen very often, particularly if the mistake has ruined lives.
On Wednesday, Bill Clinton openly admitted that the so-called prison reform legislation he signed into law as president has been greatly responsible for the explosion of the American prison population.
On Wednesday, Clinton acknowledged that policy's role in over-incarceration in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour.
"The problem is the way it was written and implemented is we cast too wide a net and we had too many people in prison," Clinton said Wednesday. "And we wound up...putting so many people in prison that there wasn't enough money left to educate them, train them for new jobs and increase the chances when they came out so they could live productive lives."
Indeed,
if you study the numbers, prison population growth in America was rising in the few years before Bill Clinton was president, but it absolutely exploded from 1992 on. In fact, since 1992, the American prison population
has almost doubled in size. This accounts for the absurd reality that the United States has just 5 percent of the world's population but has over 25 percent of the world's prisoners.
The real question is what do we do about this problem.
Clinton said he agreed with his wife's new bent on criminal justice reform and called bipartisan support for those types of reforms "one of the most hopeful things."
"I mean, going from conservative Republicans to liberal Democrats and the people in between saying there's too many people in jail and we're not doing enough to rehabilitate the ones you could rehabilitate," Clinton said. "We're wasting too much money locking people up who don't need to be there."