This is why Bill Clinton (NOT HILLARY) is racist in my opinion:

[mucifer]

Nothing to do with goofy campaign statements he might have made in the heat of the moment. It's what he did when he was president of the United States of America (can't blame Hillary for his deeds).

The Center on Criminal and Juvenile Justice has done amazing research on prison stats. I was a prisoner's rights activist in the 1990s and they were very helpful.

Here's some quotes and a link to the data and realize this article was written several years ago not during the present campaign.

President Bill Clinton: The Incarceration President
When William Jefferson Clinton took office in 1993, he was embraced by some as a moderate change from the previous twelve years of tough on crime Republican administrations. Now, eight years later, the latest criminal justice statistics show that it was actually Democratic President Bill Clinton who implemented arguably the most punitive platform on crime in the last two decades. In fact, "tough on crime" policies passed during the Clinton Administration's tenure resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.

Although Republicans are normally thought to hold the tough on crime mantle, in President Clinton's first-term (1992-1996), 148,000 more state and federal prisoners were added than under President Reagan's first term (1980-1984), and 34,000 more than were added under President Bush's four-year term (1988-1992).3 ...

The money and resources spent by governments and private interests on the criminal justice system is so large that it is having a profound impact on our economy, and as a result, our society. In 1994, just two years after President Bill Clinton took office, there were 1.4 million prison and jail inmates in the U.S. and by 1997, the criminal justice system employed more than two million people,6 and cost taxpayers more than $70 billion a year. One estimate suggests that by 2002, the criminal justice system will cost taxpayers more than $200 billion annually.7 Today, there are more people working in the criminal justice system than are working in community and social service occupations (like employment, vocational, mental health and substance abuse counseling).8 Ironically, these are the occupations that are most likely to be geared towards preventing crime, and helping to rehabilitate ex-offenders, as opposed to occupations that are designed to arrest, prosecute, detain and imprison. With two million people behind bars in the U.S., and 4.5 million people on probation and parole, America ends the Clinton-era with at least 8.5 million people who are either under the control of the correctional system or working for the criminal justice system.



While everyone is affected by the nation's quadrupling of the prison population, the African American community has borne the brunt of the nation's incarceration boom. From 1980 to 1992, the African American incarceration rate increased by an average of 138.4 per 100,000 per year. Still, despite a more than doubling of the African American incarceration rate in the 12 years prior to President Clinton's term in office, the African American incarceration rate continued to increase by an average rate of 100.4 per 100,000 per year. In total, between 1980 and 1999, the incarceration rate for African Americans more than tripled from 1156 per 100,000, to 3,620 per 100,000. (See Chart III)"


Yet, by signing the Violent Crime Control Act and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which provided prison construction funds to the states, President Clinton's policies had already helped shift funds from higher education to corrections. By 1995, state expenditures for prison construction grew by $926 million, while expenditures for university construction fell by an equivalent $954 million.9 That year, more was actually spent by states around the country building prisons ($2.6 billion) than building universities ($2.5 billion).10



Here's some info on Bill's apology:

In the last days of his presidency, President Bill Clinton told a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine that mandatory minimum sentences were "unconscionable" and "we really need a re-examination of our entire prison policy."14 With a state, federal and jail inmate population that has grown by over 673,000 inmates since 1993, President Bill Clinton managed to contradict the last eight years of his stance on crime control in one sentence. President Clinton devoted two consecutive campaigns to "getting tough on crime," signing into law a bill that included the largest increase in crime control funding ever,15 and promoting measures that revoked sentencing discretion from federal judges. In his last days in office-- when he could no longer make lasting criminal justice policies--President Clinton repudiated one of the major tenets of his approach to crime control.



http://www.cjcj.org/pubs/clinton/clinton.html




BTW I wish all this wasn't true. But, it is.

[panader0]

1. 5th REC. Very interesting

If we could just get the pot smokers out, think how much we'd save.

[mucifer]

2. so many lives destroyed with these policies.