Now don’t get me wrong, if it came down to Trump or Biden, I might hold my nose, but it will be Biden. To tell the truth I am going to hold my nose if Kamala Harris get the nod because she has a spotty record also when it come to incarcerating minorities. I like Bernie, but if we follow him and some of his policies, look to bring $2.00 home on your paycheck after taxes. We not going to even mention who will need social security payments since the government will be taking care of you. That’s over with. The system can’t afford to take care of you plus pay you, so bye Bernie. But I am getting out my lane, because this is not what this story is about. There is so much hoopla about Joe and how only Joe can defeat Trump. I think he can beat Trump for one reason. Because I don’t think another minority President is going into the white House in 2020. It might be a minority Vice President, but count on the big chair is going to another white guy. Now before you get on the Biden for President bandwagon, take a look at this article we published in 2017 called “Safe Neighborhoods.”
” In 1994 the largest crime bill ever enacted by the United States was passed by Congress. The bill was written by then Sen. Joe Biden and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The law put thousands of extra police on the streets and provided funding in the billions of dollars for the building of new prisons. It turned some crimes which at first were misdemeanors into felonies, required states to establish registries for sexual offenders and it provided minimum sentencing guidelines. Judges no longer had the discretion of determining how long a person should be detained. It was the major reason and cause of minority mass incarceration.
Mandatory minimum sentences, for nonviolent crimes, were disproportionately given out to Black and Latino offenders. Professor Khalil Muhammad of the Harvard Kennedy School said at the time, “The 1994 crime bill was a signature accomplishment for Bill Clinton.” As much as some people admire the Clinton’s, it was under his administration, and with his wife support, that the era of mass incarceration began. The unimaginably rigid doctrine reach into the poor working class neighborhoods of Blacks and Latinos, stealing decades of life from tens of thousands. Under the “3 strikes” provision of the bill, people were being lock up for 30 years for having a nickel bag of marijuana on them.
Things were not much different under George W. Bush, he had already made a name for himself when he was Governor of Texas for allegedly signing 152 execution orders, the most of any governor in U.S. history. Bush ended mandatory supervision and early parole. It worked like this, if your time for good behavior and time spent equaled your sentence, than you were automatically let out for supervised parole. If you had gang affiliations then the sentence could be more severe. President Obama, ended mandatory sentencing by putting policies in place that circumvented the harsh penalties and established the “Fair Sentencing Act Of 2010,” which made similar amounts of crack cocaine and powered cocaine needed to trigger certain federal crime penalties more equal. Thousands had their sentence shortened because of the change.
Fast forward to 2017. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has move to rollback the Obama administrations policy of letting federal prosecutors not specify the amount of drugs involved when charging low-level and nonviolent drug offenders. That policy effectively gave judges discretion to set sentences lower than the mandatory punishments ranging from five years to life in prison as federal law dictates when someone is convicted of a crime involving a certain amount of illegal drugs. The memo released to US prosecutors said “It is a core principle that prosecutors should charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense.This policy affirms our responsibility to enforce the law, is moral and just, and produces consistency. This policy fully utilizes the tools Congress has given us.” The AG believes that the will of Congress was violated by the previous Obama administration, by allowing the Executive branch to dictate policy thru a federal agency headed by one of its surrogates in the form of former AG Eric Holder.
Opponents say the harking back to the 1980’s “War On Drugs,” laws which sent people to prison for decades and sometime life was not sustainable. They further say the cost to maintain such a large prison population was detrimental to the states and the American taxpayer. In the AG’s latest step to “take back our neighborhoods,” he is updating a 10 year old program called “Safe Neighborhoods.” The plan from the Bush administration was basically shelved because of funding concerns and that its goal of capturing high value, high level criminals, often resulted in the capture and prosecution of street level offenders. Sessions has asked for 40 additional federal prosecutors and $70 million to jump start the program.”
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