Neil wrote:
Other big problems created by white folk. Imprisoning black people for possession of drugs. Total rubbish. White people's favorite drugs, being tobacco and alcohol, are terribly addictive and dangerous, but entirely legal. You can kill someone while drunk in your car, and if you are white, wealthy and have a clean record, you can get away with no prison time. Possession of marijuana in the past could get someone years in jail if they were black, poor and had minor previous offenses. Which gets into the appalling record of police savagery and aggressive pursuit of these "crimes without victims" pushed by conservative Republicans, for the most part. Totally cruel and misguided.
And all this time I thought Joe Biden was a democrat. Didn't know he was a REPUBLICAN..
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, now known as the 1994 crime law, was the result of years of work by Biden, who oversaw the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, and other Democrats. It was an attempt to address a big issue in America at the time: Crime, particularly violent crime, had been rising for decades, starting in the 1960s but continuing, on and off, through the 1990s (in part due to the crack cocaine epidemic).
Politically, the legislation was also a chance for Democrats — including the recently elected president, Bill Clinton — to wrestle the issue of crime away from Republicans. Polling suggested Americans were very concerned about high crime back then.
Biden reveled in the politics of the 1994 law, bragging after it passed that “the liberal wing of the Democratic Party” was now for “60 new death penalties,” “70 enhanced penalties,” “100,000 cops,” and “125,000 new state prison cells.”
The law imposed tougher prison sentences at the federal level and encouraged states to do the same. It provided funds for states to build more prisons, aimed to fund 100,000 more cops, and backed grant programs that encouraged police officers to carry out more drug-related arrests — an escalation of the war on drugs.