“We need more police, we need more and tougher prison sentences ..."

[Sancho]

27. Then you have been in a cave...

Hillary has openly said that she didn't agree with all of Bill's 1994 act, that sentences for drug crimes were wrong or unnecessary, and that sentencing was discriminatory by race.

This is old material for her, but she's reiterated it lately.

More prisons was not as simple as you imply. In the 80's, prisons were overcrowded and judges were declaring them cruel - so they were releasing prisoners early by court order. It caused quite a problem when released criminals committed new crimes. This was big news in the 80's and early 90's. Hillary clearly stated "violent" criminals even 20 years ago, but she was looking for proper public prisons for convicted, dangerous inmates - and overcrowded county jails with tents, cots, and mixing in the youth was unacceptable.

State and local governments were stuck with mandatory sentencing laws, but no money to build appropriate facilities. Now, the GOP figured out how to make a profit with private prisons, so they've gone the other way over 20 years - including places like Florida where most convicts are black (even for minor crimes), but they will NEVER be allowed to vote, so it's another way to get rid of Democrats!!

We did NOT have "plenty of cell space", but instead had a overcrowding problem. If you closed all those private prisons today, it would be a problem again. Also, all the progressive candidates have backed off on mandatory sentencing and jail time for non-violent crimes. Unfortunately, there has to be a safety net (drug treatment for example) that does not exist today.

See link and excerpt below...


http://photo.pds.org:5012/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1999091700

"Should some of the resources being devoted to building prisons be redirected to educational and other social spending?

In 1983, federal District Judge William Wayne Justice assumed direct control of the state prison system in Texas. Overcrowding had caused such bad conditions, Justice said, that prisoners' constitutional rights were being violated -- specifically the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Footnote 1

Texas responded to the ruling with a massive prison-building campaign. In the last two decades, the state penal system has grown nearly tenfold -- from about 15 prisons housing 18,000 inmates to 110 facilities incarcerating 150,000 inmates. Footnote 2

Many other states also went on prison-building sprees in recent years, though none grew as fast as Texas. From 1990 to 1995 alone, Texas and the other states spent almost $15 billion on prison construction, adding almost 400,000 new beds. The federal government also was busy, building 45 new prisons during the same period. Footnote 3

As in Texas, prison construction around the nation was the result of overcrowding caused by increased crime and harsher sentencing laws enacted since the 1980s.

“We've built more prisons because we've needed to take more criminals off the streets,” says Todd Gaziano, a senior fellow in legal studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “It's as simple as that.”

But liberals and others contend that it is actually not so simple. They say the prison-building boom itself has been an overly simplistic way of dealing with the complex societal problems that are associated with crime. “We've taken the easy and expedient way out by saying that we'll deal with these problems by locking people up,” says Jenni Gainsborough, communications director for the Campaign for an Effective Crime Policy."