Here, I am just going to have to go with the old mainstay, “No shit, Sherlock.”
President Bill Clinton on Wednesday conceded that over-incarceration in the United States stems in part from policies passed under his administration.
Clinton signed into law an omnibus crime bill in 1994 that included the federal “three strikes” provision, mandating life sentences for criminals convicted of a violent felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug crimes. 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.”
There is a very good reason that progressives tend not to remember the Clinton presidency fondly, and this is one of them. To be sure, there were many fine and well-intentioned things in the Crime Bill of 1994, including the ill-fated Assault Weapons ban. The overwhelming impact of the law, however, was punitive and cruel, and it led quite predictably to prison overcrowding. It also effectively eliminated any kind of college-level education for inmates who couldn’t afford it, introduced mandatory drug testing, and created 60 new death penalty offenses.
And this was enacted overwhelmingly before the Gingrich Revolution came that November.
If the Democrats hoped to prove that they were tough on crime, the electorate didn’t seem impressed.
