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Hillary Clinton
Related: About this forumThe real reason mass incarceration happened (HRC GROUP)
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/11/11399870/mass-incarceration-cause
Excerpts:
Unintended consequences are a constant in politics, and many veteran Democrats talk about the prison boom of the late 20th century as if it's an example of them. Speaking about the '94 crime bill last May, for example, Bill Clinton said, "The problem [with] the way it was written and implemented is we cast too wide a net and we had too many people in prison," as if they'd intended to fight crime but hadn't intended to end up with quite so many people behind bars.
In fact, the bill, which passed with a large, bipartisan majority including liberal stalwarts like Bernie Sanders and Ted Kennedy, wasn't a major cause of mass incarceration in a literal sense. But both the bill itself and, in some ways more importantly, the rhetoric Clinton used about the bill (which was different from the rhetoric Sanders used) were part of the larger trend of "tough on crime" politics that unquestionably drove America's prison population to new heights.
And when trying to understand what really caused mass incarceration, it's important not to overthink it. Mass incarceration happened because mass incarceration was popular.
The crime rate was high in the 1980s and '90s, so there were plenty of criminals to lock up. And people wanted them locked up. The public favored longer, harsher prison terms, more executions, and a punitive rhetoric that would back those things up. Indeed, the public didn't just favor these things it demanded them. Crime and punishment was a voting issue for the 1990s electorate, and most politicians representing any kind of substantial urban area embraced harsher punishment of criminals.
In fact, the bill, which passed with a large, bipartisan majority including liberal stalwarts like Bernie Sanders and Ted Kennedy, wasn't a major cause of mass incarceration in a literal sense. But both the bill itself and, in some ways more importantly, the rhetoric Clinton used about the bill (which was different from the rhetoric Sanders used) were part of the larger trend of "tough on crime" politics that unquestionably drove America's prison population to new heights.
And when trying to understand what really caused mass incarceration, it's important not to overthink it. Mass incarceration happened because mass incarceration was popular.
The crime rate was high in the 1980s and '90s, so there were plenty of criminals to lock up. And people wanted them locked up. The public favored longer, harsher prison terms, more executions, and a punitive rhetoric that would back those things up. Indeed, the public didn't just favor these things it demanded them. Crime and punishment was a voting issue for the 1990s electorate, and most politicians representing any kind of substantial urban area embraced harsher punishment of criminals.
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The real reason mass incarceration happened (HRC GROUP) (Original Post)
Her Sister
Apr 2016
OP
2naSalit
(86,600 posts)1. I remember it well...
few had good remedies at the time and there was still some luddite-type thinking about crime and punishment... racism was supposed to have been done away with by then.
yallerdawg
(16,104 posts)2. In 1992 we were facing a fourth Republican presidential term in a row.
Lessons learned from the Dukakis campaign:
The exploding prison population wasn't an accident; it was politicians' response to objective political pressure to keep felons in jail longer. The lesson elected officials took from the Willie Horton ad was that if you let a criminal out of jail and he committed another serious offense, it could end your career. So they responded by making it much harder to get out of jail.
Her Sister
(6,444 posts)3. I was there too!!
To get elected you had to be "Tough on Crime" so everyone went around trying to prove they were tough on crime and explaining how to solve the crime problems! It was a National Dilemma! And everyone was affected by crime. At that time it felt that crime was just always going to continue at that rate. I went to college at that time, and every phone call I got from my family, I really thought I was going to get bad news! As a young woman I was not only homesick but felt scared and heartsick too.