NYTimes | (Good
magazine pointed out: “Hillary Clinton lobbied lawmakers to back the
Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Bill Clinton signed the
act into law in 1994. The largest crime bill in history, it provided
$9.7 billion in prison funding. From 1992 to 2000, the amount of
prisoners in the U.S. increased almost 60 percent.”)
Clinton
pointed to her record on civil rights work, but she never apologized
for, or even acknowledged, her and her husband’s role in giving America
the dubious distinction of having the world’s highest incarceration
rate.
To me, the diversion was stunning, and telling.
Maggie
Haberman noted in The New York Times that the exchange “showed Mrs.
Clinton as even her admirers lament that she is seldom seen:
spontaneous, impassioned and seemingly unconcerned about potential
repercussions.”
Politically,
that may be true. She was agile and evasive, for sure. She bobbed and
weaved like Floyd Mayweather. But there was a moral issue, an
accountability issue, that still hung rotting in the ring: What in her
has changed, now that she has seen the devastation a policy she
advocated has wrought?
(Last
month, at the annual convention of the N.A.A.C.P., Bill Clinton did
apologize, saying, “I signed a bill that made the problem worse.” He
continued, “And I want to admit it.” His contrition makes Hillary’s
nonapology all the more vexing.)
This
is the part of the Black Lives Matter political protests that I love so
much: The idea that you must test the fealty of your supposed friends
in addition to battling the fury of your avowed foes.
The
truth of America is that both liberals and conservatives alike have
things for which they must answer, sins for which they must atone, when
it comes to how the criminal justice system has been aimed at and
unleashed upon black people in this country.
And
it’s not just the Clintons who have things they must answer for on
criminal justice and black people. As I have written about before,
toward the end of his tenure, President George W. Bush drastically
reduced funding for the Byrne Formula Grant Program, which had been
established by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act to supercharge the war on drugs —
a disastrous boondoggle that would come to be a war waged primarily against marijuana use by black men.
As the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out in 2011,
“The racial disparities are staggering: despite the fact that whites
engage in drug offenses at a higher rate than African-Americans, African-Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at a rate that is 10 times greater than that of whites.’”
A
group of senators, mostly Democrats, wrote a letter demanding that the
funding be restored. Barack Obama ran on a promise to restore that
funding, and once elected, he did just that. As I wrote in 2010:
“The
2009 stimulus package presented these Democrats with the opportunity,
and they seized it. The legislation, designed by Democrats and signed by
President Obama, included $2 billion for Byrne Grants to be awarded by
the end of September 2010. That was nearly a 12-fold increase in
financing. Whatever the merits of these programs, they are outweighed by
the damage being done. Financing prevention is fine. Financing a
race-based arrest epidemic is not.”
And these sins exist not only at the federal level, but also at the local level.
Many
of the recent cases have been in some of our most liberal cities —
cities that, as Isabel Wilkerson brilliantly pointed out in January,
were the very ones to which black Americans flocked during the Great
Migration.
