salon | Hillary Clinton wants to run for president as an economic
populist, as a humane progressive interested in bolstering the fortunes
of poor and middle class Americans. But before liberals enthusiastically
sign up for Team Hillary, they should remember this: In the late 1990s,
Bill Clinton played in instrumental role in creating the world’s
largest prison system — one that has devastated our inner cities, made a
mockery of American idealism abroad, and continues to inflict needless
suffering on millions of people. And he did it with his wife’s support.
That
liberals are now being asked to get excited for Hillary’s Clinton’s
candidacy, announced on Sunday, almost requires the suspension of
disbelief. That the best progressive alternative to Clinton is a long-shot from Vermont is
a tragedy. This is not to say that President Hillary Clinton would
pursue the same prison policies as her husband — the political headwinds
on criminal justice reform have shifted considerably in the past two
decades, and the Clintons, accordingly, have shifted with
them. But past actions should matter, and what they show is that the
Clinton Dynasty embraced and exacerbated one of the late 20th Century’s
greatest public policy disasters.
The explosion of the prison system under
Bill Clinton’s version of the “War on Drugs” is impossible to dispute.
The total prison population rose by 673,000 people under Clinton’s
tenure — or by 235,000 more than it did under President Ronald Reagan,
according to a study by the Justice Policy Institute. “Under President
Bill Clinton, the number of prisoners under federal jurisdiction
doubled, and grew more than it did under the previous 12-years of
Republican rule,combined,” states the JPI report (italics theirs). The
federal incarceration rate in 1999, the last year of the Democrat’s
term, was 42 per 100,000 — more than double the federal incarceration
rate at the end of President Reagan’s term (17 per 100,000), and 61
percent higher than at the end of President George Bush’s term (25 per
100,000), according to JPI.
