It’s not enough for Biden to simply say that he’s changed.
Both Kamala Harris’s and Joe Biden’s records on criminal-justice reform were questioned during Wednesday night’s debate — and they absolutely should have been.
Representative Tulsi Gabbard pulled no punches in hitting Harris on hers, and she was right to have done so. Harris’s record is absolutely terrible on this issue, as I’ve written about before.
But Harris wasn’t the only one to face this criticism. Nope, Joe Biden faced it too, with Senator Cory Booker criticizing him for his support of that awful 1994 crime bill that contributed to the imprisonment of so many — and he was right to have done so, too.
Now, as Biden pointed out, it’s true that Booker himself doesn’t have a perfect record on criminal justice as mayor of Newark — for instance, there’s his support for stop-and-frisk practices — but he was still absolutely accurate to point out that Biden’s is disastrous.
Biden, of course, had previously tried to portray himself as some kind of uber-progressive criminal-justice-reform hero, saying in response to a question from Jake Tapper on the issue:
Right now, we’re in a situation where, when someone is convicted of a drug crime, they end up going to jail and to prison. They should be going to rehabilitation. They shouldn’t be going to prison. When in prison, they should be learning to read and write and not just sit in there and learn how to be better criminals.
But the truth is, coming from Biden, this is laughable. When Booker stated that Biden’s complaints about mass incarceration were hypocritical given the fact that he’s partially responsible for the legislation that contributed to it, he was absolutely correct. In fact, as Christan Britschgi pointed out in a piece in Reason last week, Biden’s new criminal-justice-reform plan is basically just him trying to undo all of the damage he’s done in this area throughout his career.
For example, as Britschgi points out, Biden was one of the original co-sponsors of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, when he was a senator from Delaware. This law actually created some of the exact problems that Biden decries now, such as requiring mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders and instituting the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine (which, of course, resulted in disproportionately longer sentences for minority offenders than for white offenders for doing pretty much exactly the same thing). Biden is, predictably, now saying he is against both of these things.
Worse, as Britschgi also notes, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 is far from the only piece of prison-happy legislation that the former vice president has supported. No, Biden also supported the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which increased federal funding for prison construction — a move that ultimately had a hand in the same system of mass incarceration that Biden now condemns.
I understand that people can change their minds on certain issues (I mean, I used to think the Backstreet Boys were good), but this complete and total flip-flop should be concerning to anyone who cares about criminal-justice reform. This issue, after all, is about so much more than just politics and talking points — it’s about people’s lives. Let me be clear: Biden’s past support of these pieces of legislation wasn’t just a bad move for him politically, it was also a move that led to people staying behind bars for draconian amounts of time. It was a move that created real harm, separating families and destroying lives.
It’s not enough for Biden to simply say that he’s changed. It’s not enough for him to just say the right things now, when he has done so many of the wrong things in the past. Think about it: When we are talking about people’s actual lives, it’s not enough to just say “Well, now I wouldn’t ruin it! We cool?” At the very least, he needs to accept responsibility and show real contrition for his actions and the outcomes that they helped create — and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone whose father was locked up for years and years over a little bit of crack isn’t in the mood to forgive him, either.