Whoa, trying to sleep after watching Hillary when confronted by polite, intelligent, non-violent protesters who are having to put themselves in these obviously unpleasant and possibly degrading positions as a matter of survival was scary, to say the least.
I had to watch again this morning to see if perhaps I had dramatized my reaction after watching late last night. It was as difficult to watch this morning as it was last night.
So, Hillary is trying to figure it out. What to do about how mass incarceration and prisons for profit have eviscerated a generation of Black and Hispanic kids. Not only that, if the prison for profit system doesn't get them they have a good chance of being obliterated by police violence. Blacks and Hispanics in US are subjected to physical violence, political violence, legal violence and economic violence, all of which add up to racial injustice.
Hillary has promoted and profited by the policies which have led to racial injustice.
At the center of the most tense moments in the New Hampshire meeting is the assertion by #BlackLivesMatter representatives that Clinton must accept some responsibility for supporting policies and legislation that have led to mass incarceration in the United States, particularly the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act, passed during President Bill Clinton’s first term.
The act was the largest crime bill in U.S. history, and as the Clinton White House worked to build support for it in 1994, Hillary joined the effort lobbying lawmakers for support. “We need more police. We need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders," she proclaimed at a Women in Policing conference in August of that year. "We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets."
The act passed and was signed into law one month later. Federal funding for prisons increased by $19 billion, while funding for public housing funding fell by $17 billion. According to a study by the Justice Policy Institute, during President Bill Clinton's eight years in office, the number of prisoners in federal prisons almost doubled, outstripping the increases over the prior 12 years of Republican administration, while almost 60% of those sent to federal prison during the Clinton years were for drug offenses. The end result: a federal prison population larger than at any other point in American history.
I don't believe for a minute that Hillary is naive about solutions. There are lots of good solutions out there; she just put the responsibility for them onto the victims.
Hillary could start by refusing to take money from the prison for profit industry which hires out it's inmates as cheap labor so as to make more profit.
Petition asking Hillary Clinton to cut her financial ties with 'prison for profit'