A bit more complex than what we usually find here on the DK these days.
I wanted to share an article from Washington Monthly, by Mark Kleiman, professor of public policy at the New York University Marron Institute.
www.washingtonmonthly.com/…
He writes:
If I told you that Hillary Clinton wasn’t a real progressive because she supported the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and the federal assault weapons ban, you’d think I was either crazy or joking. But in fact, the 1994 Crime Bill, which included both provisions, has become one of the standard anti-Hillary-Clinton soundbites used by supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders. (Yes, the president at the time was Bill Clinton, not Hillary Clinton, and a Vermont congressman named Bernie Sanders voted for the bill, but never mind. Facts have a well-known a counter-revolutionary bias.)
Kleiman says the bill was a mix of the good, bad and ugly.
1994 was the fifth consecutive year in which the FBI counted more than 23,000 murders: an all-time high. Then, as now, about half of the victims were African-American. Today’s murder rate (and total violent-crime rate) is just about half. “The street-level arms race financed by the crack trade had expanded the age range of killers and their victims down into adolescence. If you weren’t seriously worried about crime in 1994, you just weren’t paying attention.”
The thing the President and his advisers really seemed to believe in was carrying out his campaign pledge to put “100,000 new cops on the beat” by providing federal money to hire local police officers. But given the apparent uselessness of just adding more resources to a system that didn’t know what it was doing, the Administration added a twist: to get the money, departments had to commit - at least on paper - to implement “community policing” to move departments away from the demonstrated futility of the random-preventive-patrol-plus-rapid-response-to-calls-for-service model ...
Kleiman continues: Most of the explosion in incarceration for which the bill “(and President Clinton as its sponsor, and Hillary Clinton because her last name is “Clinton”) get the blame occurred before the bill became law, while virtually all of the decline in crime decline for which neither the bill nor either Clinton gets any credit came after the bill’s passage. “
The one disastrously bad provision of the law was grants to states to build new prisons. Not only was that a bad idea on its own, but it was made much worse by the addition of another conservative shibboleth, “truth in sentencing.” [snip] The Republicans, who had made prison-building and truth in sentencing the price of their acquiescence with the rest of the bill, insisted that in order to get federal prison-building money the states introduce this concept for violent crimes without shortening nominal sentences.
He says the prison-building money and truth- in-sentencing provision were predictably bad policies, and at worst an act of pointless, politically-motivated cruelty.
Hillary Clinton did on at least one occasion - after the passage of the bill, and the course of arguing for community policing - use the phrase “super-predator.” Sanders never talked about “super-predators, to his credit.
Sanders’ theory seems to be that crime would mostly go away if the country offered better economic opportunity to poor people. That it’s hard to offer economic opportunity without first offering security of person and property doesn’t seem to have occurred to him; but then, it’s not much of a problem in Burlington. If Burlington had the crime rate of Brooklyn, or if Sen. Sanders had stayed in Brooklyn rather than moving to the peace, quiet, and safety of Burlington, he would have had to pay more attention to crime, because his constituents (of all races and economic classes, but especially minorities and the poor) would have been deeply worried by it.
Kleiman says protection of the social and economic life of a community from the costs created by the fear of crime and the avoidance of victimization “is a first-order requirement of class justice and of racial justice.” [snip] “You are more likely to be killed or robbed, and your home is more likely to be burglarized in the poorer, darker parts of Brooklyn than it is in lighter-skinned and more prosperous areas of Manhattan or Burlington. And the person who victimizes you is less likely to be caught and punished, and more likely - holding constant the severity of the offense - to get off lightly even if he (or, less likely, she) is caught.”
And that is why someone passionately concerned about crime and about racial and social justice could reasonably prefer Hillary Clinton’s record on the issue - warts and all - to Senator Sanders’s policy of benign neglect.