(This post is from our new blog: Unofficial Sources.)
Hillary Clinton distanced herself from her husband’s criminal justice legacy on Wednesday, labeling the system that he actively supported as “profoundly wrong.”
“We have allowed our criminal justice system to get out of balance,” Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, said in a speech at Columbia University.
She acknowledged the recent deaths of black men at the hands of police. “From Ferguson to Staten Island to Baltimore, the patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable,” she said. “Walter Scott shot in the back in Charleston, South Carolina — unarmed, in debt, terrified of spending more time in jail for child support payments he couldn’t afford. Tamir Rice shot in the park in Cleveland, Ohio, unarmed and just 12 years old. Eric Garner, choked to death after being stopped for selling cigarettes on the streets of our city. And now Freddie Gray, his spine nearly severed while in police custody.”
But her call to “end the era of mass incarceration” comes in stark contrast to the policies that her husband Bill espoused during his presidency.
During Bill Clinton’s eight years in the White House, the number of people imprisoned by the federal government nearly doubled, from 85,565 in 1993 to 156,572 in 2001.
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 he signed into law played a major role in that increase. The former president acknowledged on Tuesday that the system “put too many people in prison” during his two terms in the White House.
Hillary Clinton has also been a longtime advocate of the death penalty, though with restrictions. During her time as a Democratic senator from New York, Clinton co-sponsored the Innocence Protection Act of 2003. It became law a year later under the Justice for All Act, allowing funding for post-conviction DNA testing and establishing a DNA testing system for those sentenced to execution.
Clinton also called for body cameras for every police department in the country.
As usual, Clinton did not take questions from the press after her speech. She did, however, have time to meet with Columbia students after the speech for selfies.
(Photo: Mark Lennihan/Associated Press)
The problem is that only one segment of the criminal justice system is privatized – the prisons. This causes it to grow (growth is what private enterprise is good at) at the expense of everything else. Courts are backlogged and police are overstressed, causing them to lash out. The answer is to privatize the police and the courts as well, which will create vertical integration. This would provide the prison system with the economies of scale necessary to ramp up a major prison manufacturing industry that would once again allow the US to become globally competitive.
There would be some issues at first. Parents would be separated from their children, but you could introduce family prisons to solve this problem. Just as children now inherit wealth when their parents die, under the new system, they would inherit their parents’ remaining prison sentences.
Initially there would also be an acute shortage of prisons. But the construction of thousands of new prisons would help spur the economy and be a significant spin-off benefit.
House prices would fall, as millions of homes were left empty. But these could be demolished and turned into public parks. So in the long term, this would be a benefit as well.
Crime rates would tumble, traffic jams would disappear and those remaining free would become much more respectful of authority.
It’s unusual to have a public policy initiative with absolutely no downside.
There is one problem. The process is patented by the Kim family.
…who stole it from Lewis Carroll, whole stole it from Human Nature?
“`Fury said to a
mouse, That he
met in the
house,
“Let us
both go to
law: I will
prosecute
YOU. –Come,
I’ll take no
denial; We
must have a
trial: For
really this
morning I’ve
nothing
to do.”
Said the
mouse to the
cur, “Such
a trial,
dear Sir,
With
no jury
or judge,
would be
wasting
our
breath.”
“I’ll be
judge, I’ll
be jury,”
Said
cunning
old Fury:
“I’ll
try the
whole
cause,
and
condemn
you
to
death.”
those prats from Columbia are like the communist youth waiting to shake hands with Joseph Stalin after WWII. Well the future priests of the democratic faith need to show their reverence for the future great leader
Risking repetitiveness, Hillary’s for the American people in the exact manner dicks are for virginity.
“C’mon baby, let me in just this once, you know I love you…”
As Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes [or speaks] is a lie, including and and the.”
Didnt the clintons and cocaine airplanes with medical surply landing in arkansas go hand in hand?
Dissagreeing with justice after such economical desissions.
I think hillary is as bad as queen Elizabeth,
And in my opinion both should get shaved and enjoy a lawinsky cigar instead of politican.
Oh and feinstein too.
Yeah but then support tpp.
How much meth comes fron indonasia,
And how.
And i better hope that the arrest in 2013 by is was a monopoly reenforcement.
Go kamp ship kamp.
I hope she goes home to bill and gets some nelken in the kelken. So hard that she needs to lay on a green field go kamp go kamp.
“But her call to “end to the era of mass incarceration” comes in stark contrast to the policies that her husband Bill espoused during his presidency.”
So what? She wasn’t a member of Bill’s administration. She wasn’t a senator. She wasn’t Bill’s puppetmaster. What Bill did is as irrelevant to her campaign as things Ron did are irrelevant to Rand’s. Or the elder Bushes’ things done to Jeb’s. I’m not going to vote for any of these assholes including Hillary, but it will be for rational reasons, not what family members did.
“Clinton also called for body cameras for every police department in the country.”
She’s cynically campaigning on things she’ll have no power to control.
What about campaigning on opportunities within the purview of the executive branch of the federal gov’t, like closing the Guantanamo detention camp? Oh, never mind, that one’s been used and is well past its shelf date.
How about removing cannabis from Schedule 1? Sorry, Bill has too much baggage as a self-claimed non-inhaler.
Campaigning for body cameras is campaigning for even more surveillance. I keep getting stuck on how blithely unaware of this people are.
Waiting for the next hiking shoe and combat boots to drop.
Crime went down EVERY YEAR of the Clinton Administration. Every. year. http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
Wanna know why? It wasn’t just increased funding for crime prevention, but he put more cops on the street, oversaw the biggest economic expansion of modern times, and passed an immense amount of laws designed to aid the middle class. And don’t tell me the War on Drugs started under Bush. That happened FAR before him.
I know how hard it is for people like you to give ANY credit to authority figures. But you need to admit Clinton’s approach worked.
He started AmeriCorps which actually did give youth, especially those from complicated situations, another out or step up, too, while additionally helping to deal with infrastructure issues. That program should have been expanded to deal with said growing infrastructure issues and diminishing options, but instead… nah, more money for defense than the *Pentagon even asked for*. Something something massive American military cities being built up and abandoned in ‘terrorist countries’ having better roads than the American highway system, rotting dams, something other somethings whatever.
Hillary, like Blair, hides her true self in the spelling of her name itself – she is a “liar” like Tony, even better. Her folks have carried out surveys and she will say whatever she needs to in order to get elected as President. After the election she will outdo this current incumbent and the forest chameleon in changing colors. Now Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush aren’t all that virtuous, with this Rubio guy being an NSA stooge, but I doubt they will be as shameless as this female here. The only benefit to us of her contesting will be that some of those $2B will get depleted.
God help us, Amen.
There is absolutely nothing in the record of Hillary Clinton that points to any credible connection to race injustice issues and the goal of eliminating them. She is opportunistically latching on to the Baltimore media event and trying to use it as a vehicle to drive her out further into public view.
How creepy!
I wonder if she will try to distance herself from the favors her husband bestowed on Wall Street during his administration. Or the beginning of the construct of Citizen Labor Camps on his watch. One thing I doubt very much she will distance herself from; the millions the two of them have raked in since leaving office on their lucrative speaking engagements that for the most part help cheerlead the Corporate Globalist agenda….who else is going to pay 1/4 of a million for their speechifying but the corporate state that along with Obama is shoving the TPP down our throats right now.
She’s also campaigning against herself, since she supported the Clinton crime bill herself:
Source: Unique Voice, p.189-90: Remarks at Annual Women in Policing Aug 10, 1994
Sometimes changes twenty years later signify enlightenment and acceptance of being wrong. That isn’t flip-flopping, that’s growth and listening to constituency.
The private prison industry is THE greatest obstacle to overcome in any reform of the system.
In fact, they are a hidden driving force behind many of our “intractable problems” and extremely bad policies.
And it’s being paid per prisoner that is the key.
Why do we have debtors in prison, when it’s unconstitutional on its face? Why can’t we have immigration reform? Why does the
war on drugs linger when even many law enforcement people will say out loud its’ just a black hole for money?
It’s hard to kill an entire industry, or remove their profits, in a capitalist country and with politicians who are enamored with privatization like all Republicans and the corporate Dems (e.g., Clinton, Obama, Schumer, the DNC, etc.) And the prison industry is a generous donor to politicians.
Since they’re private, accountability is hard to achieve. Incompetence or brutality has to be extreme before they lose a contract.
“Why do we have debtors in prison, when it’s unconstitutional on its face? Why can’t we have immigration reform? Why does the
war on drugs linger when even many law enforcement people will say out loud its’ just a black hole for money?”
Because our judges belong to the sub-phyllum “Invertebrate”. A long as the guardians of constitution do not guard the constitution it is going to be raped. We need to first change how the judges are appointed, promoted and thrown out before anything else can happen.
Every once in a while you say something I totally agree with. This is one of those times.