Cory Booker Shoots Down Joe Biden's Claims On Crime Bill And Mass Incarceration [View all]

[marble falls]

Cory Booker Shoots Down Joe Biden’s Claims On Crime Bill And Mass Incarceration
In an interview with HuffPost, Booker called the 1994 law “awful” and “shameful.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cory-booker-shoots-down-joe-bidens-claims-on-crime-bill-and-mass-incarceration_n_5ceecafbe4b07dbfe638dc5e?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaHVmZnBvc3QuY29tLw&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAC82CMQI3xG7nJta1dhFj1YX7YUjHjOsvnhMH2Ftj7NEfu09432SH78xL1IEIkXLiLCOa4kt4uIXozhuoDdFbjOi_z-p_2sEtQiIMYOkWjSmcMbukBLJoBPapqHpLYD7oycSYIRvn5I7YXL5aQQFC-U8v1AJmxG6h6N3-zVVH8xV

By Kevin Robillard

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In an interview with HuffPost while traveling on a campaign-rented RV between two stops in southeastern Iowa during Memorial Day weekend, Booker ― who has made criminal justice reform central to his White House bid ― said he disagreed with Biden’s assertion that the 1994 law didn’t significantly increase the U.S. jail population.

“I use this word sincerely. I love Joe Biden,” Booker began, before launching into a series of criticisms of the law: “The incentives they put in that bill for people to raise mandatory minimums, for building prisons and jails ― from the time I was in law school to the time I was mayor of the city of Newark, we were building a new prison or jail every 10 days in America while the rest of our infrastructure crumbled ― overwhelmingly putting people in prison for nonviolent drug offenses that members of Congress and the Senate admit to breaking now. That bill was awful.”

“We should all agree with the force of conviction: That bill was a mistake,” he concluded, hitting his hand against the table for emphasis. “Good people signed on to that bill. People make mistakes. But let’s hold them to that. That crime bill was shameful, what it did to black and brown communities like mine [and] low-income communities from Appalachia to rural Iowa. It was a bad bill.”

Biden, then the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was the lead Senate sponsor of the legislation, which President Bill Clinton signed into law. The sprawling legislation contained multitudes of provisions, but experts today agree it was a factor in skyrocketing incarceration rates, especially for African-Americans and Latinos, primarily by incentivizing states to lock criminals up for longer periods of time and giving them billions of dollars to build new prisons. (It did not directly incentivize states to adopt stronger mandatory minimums.) Experts now believe the massive increase in incarceration had little to do with the decrease in crime rates since the 1990s.

The law also contained a ban on assault weapons and the initial version of the Violence Against Women Act.

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Why Freakonimics says crime dropped

http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/

Abortion and crime: who should you believe?
May 15, 2005 @ 11:44am
by Steven D. Levitt
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Two very vocal critics, Steve Sailer and John Lott, have been exerting a lot of energy lately trying to convince the world that the abortion reduces crime hypothesis is not correct. A number of readers have asked me to respond to these criticisms. First, let’s start by reviewing the basic facts that support the Donohue-Levitt hypothesis that legalized abortion in the 1970s explains a substantial part of the crime decline in the 1990s:

1) Five states legalized abortion three years before Roe v. Wade. Crime started falling three years earlier in these states, with property crime (done by younger people) falling before violent crime.

2) After abortion was legalized, the availability of abortions differed dramatically across states. In some states like North Dakota and in parts of the deep South, it was virtually impossible to get an abortion even after Roe v. Wade. If one compares states that had high abortion rates in the mid 1970s to states that had low abortion rates in the mid 1970s, you see the following patterns with crime. For the period from 1973-1988, the two sets of states (high abortion states and low abortion states) have nearly identical crime patterns. Note, that this is a period before the generations exposed to legalized abortion are old enough to do much crime. So this is exactly what the Donohue-Levitt theory predicts. But from the period 1985-1997, when the post Roe cohort is reaching peak crime ages, the high abortion states see a decline in crime of 30% relative to the low abortion states. Our original data ended in 1997. If one updated the study, the results would be similar.)

3) All of the decline in crime from 1985-1997 experienced by high abortion states relative to low abortion states is concentrated among the age groups born after Roe v. Wade. For people born before abortion legalization, there is no difference in the crime patterns for high abortion and low abortion states, just as the Donohue-Levitt theory predicts.

4) When we compare arrest rates of people born in the same state, just before and just after abortion legalization, we once again see the identical pattern of lower arrest rates for those born after legalization than before.

5) The evidence from Canada, Australia, and Romania also support the hypothesis that abortion reduces crime.

6) Studies have shown a reduction in infanticide, teen age drug use, and teen age childbearing consistent with the theory that abortion will reduce other social ills similar to crime.


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