As Vice President, Biden Was Still Bragging About His Racist Crime Bill

Presidential contender Joe Biden cynically co-opted Martin Luther King Day this year to express the very mildest of regrets for his draconian 1994 Crime Bill, which sentenced record numbers of mainly Black men to long prison terms for possession of even tiny amounts of drugs, especially crack cocaine.

“It was a big mistake when it was made,” he said. “We thought, we were told by the experts, that crack you never go back, it was somehow fundamentally different. It’s not different, but it’s trapped an entire generation.”

Biden pleaded that he was practically forced into drafting the legislation (originally called the Biden Crime Bill, but later somewhat unfairly renamed the Clinton Crime Bill) in his capacity as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. This pleading, as well as his use of the passive voice, sounds eerily similar to his recent excuses about how powerless he was to protect Anita Hill from the abuse she suffered during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

It was the crack that trapped and imprisoned people, not Biden. It was the Republican crackpots on Biden's panel who victimized Anita Hill all over again, not Biden.

But whenever the occasion demands it, Uncle Joe admits that regrets, he has a few. But then again, too few to mention -- unless and until he is practically forced into uttering them.  

Even during his tenure as Barack Obama's vice president, and long, long after other "experts" had correctly called out the racial bias inherent in his Crime Bill,  Biden was still doubling down on the false and debunked narrative that drug use is the primary cause of violence in poor communities.

He was still gung-ho for the racist War on Drugs, or what Michelle Alexander has aptly identified as The New Jim Crow.

One occasion was the nomination of former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske in the spring of 2009 as the Obama administration's new "drug czar." Speaking to a room full of municipal police chiefs, Biden fondly reminisced about his direct role in the creation of the White House drug czar position as well as his authorship of his post-Crime Bill COPS legislation, which allocated federal funds for cities with large black and brown populations to hire more police officers and make more drug arrests and send more black and brown individuals to prison, often for decades, for minor drug possession offenses.

We know we needed tough laws, and we have tough laws. But that wasn't enough. We needed a balanced approach in combating drugs -- one that included prevention, treatment and enforcement.

And that's why when I wrote what used to be called the Biden Crime Bill back in the '90s -- and quite frankly, many of you in this room literally sat and wrote that bill with me; it had my name on it, but you all wrote it -- when we wrote that back in 1994, I felt so strongly about the need to create specialized Drug Courts -- so we could have an alternative to incarceration and the traditional probation that included treatment and a way forward.

That's why I fought so hard for the Drug Free Communities Support Program, so we could bring together parents, teachers, business leaders, police, medical profession to prevent drug abuse and addiction in local communities.

 And that's why I, along with many of you, worked so hard for the COPS program -- because quite frankly more cops on the street is one of the best ways to keep drugs off the street.

Biden was actually to the right of President George W. Bush when he pushed, in 2002, for the addition of 50,000 police officers in America's cities, on top of the 100,000 cop positions originally funded under his 1994 Crime Bill. Biden complained, without evidence, that violent crime in inner cities had gone up as a direct result of Bush's cuts to his tough drug enforcement programs.

Biden also ran on a "tough on crime" platform during his failed 2004 presidential primary campaign. Correlating drug users with post-09/11 terrorism as well as with violence, he wrote on his website:

"Our police officers who walk the beat in every city and town across America are the backbone of homeland security  Whenever we need them, our police officers never hesitate to respond. Now they need us, and we should not hesitate to respond to law enforcement by giving them the tools they need to protect our communities. Let's save the COPS program, and, in so doing, say thank you to every cop on the street."

With Biden's crime legislation later widely criticized as the racist policy that it was, he burnished it with the "balanced approach" rhetoric that was a hallmark of other Obama policies, such as the imposition of austerity on the struggling middle and working classes and the poor coupled with paltry tax increases on the wealthy. Thus was added the cosmetic gloss of an ounce of prevention and treatment in the racist Drug War, ostensibly to "balance out" the continuing mega-tons of cruel and unusual punishment -- and to feebly camouflage the ongoing and underlying racism.

It's the same propaganda tactic Biden had used 15 years earlier to "arm-twist" his fellow Democrats into passing his Crime Bill which, besides putting 100,000 new cops on the streets, allocated $9.7 billion for the construction of new prisons, expanded the number of crimes eligible for the death penalty to 52, discouraged prison paroles and rewarded prisons with federal grants based upon increased parole-denial rates, criminalized gang membership, denied Pell educational grants to convicts, and imposed mandatory drug testing for released prisoners (practically guaranteeing a return to prison, because released prisoners have a very hard time getting work, finding housing and paying for food, given that they're denied housing and food stamp benefits because most applications forms contain a box to check for even minor convictions and,or  arrests).

 To all that cruelty he cynically tacked on the Sunset Law-prone Violence Against Women Act and a similarly temporary assault weapons ban in order to give his reactionary agenda that all-important cosmetic liberal gloss. These were sweeteners enough to convince even then-Rep. Bernie Sanders to reluctantly vote for the package.

As Michelle Alexander pointed out in a recent New York Times op-ed, the problem of violence is actually correlated not with drug use per se, but with the permanent effects of long-term incarcerations of mainly men on entire families and communities. A cop on every corner has done nothing, for example, to curb violent crime and gang activity in cities like Chicago. 

Moreover, with an epidemic of opioid addiction now affecting mainly white people, the racist War on Drugs is rapidly losing its effectiveness as a wedge issue and fear-spreading tool for right-wing politicians like Joe Biden.

Michelle Alexander wrote:

Drug law reform has never been an easier sell — especially now that opioid addiction is perceived as ravaging primarily white communities, generating far more compassion than black communities ever experienced during the crack epidemic in the late 1980s. The opportunity to curb the drug war is critically important for many communities of color, especially in places like Chicago where it has caused catastrophic harm. Nationally, the drug war helped to birth our system of mass incarceration, which now governs not only the 2.2 million people who are locked in prisons and jails in this country, but also the 4.5 million people that are under correctional control outside prison walls — on probation or parole. More than 70 million people now have criminal records that authorize legal discrimination against them, relegating them to a permanent second-class status. The overwhelming majority ensnared by this system have been convicted of nonviolent crimes and drug offenses.

This relegation of millions of people to permanent underclass status is reason enough to deny Joe Biden the Democratic presidential nomination. For one thing, there is virtually no distance between him and Trump as regards their disdain for black and brown people. I can just envision Trump patting Uncle Joe on the back during one of those televised corporate debates and claiming to be the real inspiration for the Crime Bill, what with the fear-mongering full page ad he'd taken out in the New York Times, calling for execution of the Central Park Five (who were later exonerated) just a few years before its passage.

 I guess Biden would only respond that at least he's mouthed a few convenient platitudes and words of regret for the national hysteria that he was instrumental in fomenting, while Trump has never offered any. 

 Trump, though, would then be able to one-up Biden by bragging about his commutation last year of the sentence of a grandmother serving life in prison on a cocaine trafficking charges: a sentence that was the direct result of the cruel Biden Crime Bill.

Denying Biden the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency has never been an easier sell. 

But try explaining that to the Party leadership and the donor class.