The Democrats’ current lead of the 2020 presidential race, former Vice President Joe Biden, has not impressed his liberal colleagues in the field of criminal justice. Progressives believe that Biden’s part in passing the 1994 Crime Bill is to blame for extraordinarily high incarceration rates in the minority communities.
Although today Biden rolled out a criminal justice reform plan in an effort to distance himself from the ’94 Crime Bill, Democrats such as Cory Booker aren’t buying it.
“Joe Biden had more than 40 years to get this right…The proud architect of a failed system is not the person to fix it” said New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. This is some juicy primary rhetoric between candidates as the washingtontimes.com reports that “Booker has been credited with building a strong ground game in Iowa and with investing a lot of time and energy in South Carolina, where he is focused on turning out black voters, which made up a majority of the Democratic primary electorate.”
Looks like Biden and Booker already have a lot to spar about when they will share the stage at the next Democratic Debate in September. Justice reform advocates have condemned the law Biden supported, but he has also defended himself and the bill, most recently during a campaign stop in New Hampshire where he said: “the idea that the crime bill generated mass incarceration – it did not generate mass incarceration.”
