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| | Biden's son, Hunter Biden, was thrown out of the [[US Navy]] for [[cocaine]] use. Hunter Biden has been a Washington [[lobbyist]] since 2001.<ref>[https://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-08-24-Biden-son_N.htm Biden's son a registered lobbyist since 2001], [[USA Today]]</ref> | | Biden's son, Hunter Biden, was thrown out of the [[US Navy]] for [[cocaine]] use. Hunter Biden has been a Washington [[lobbyist]] since 2001.<ref>[https://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-08-24-Biden-son_N.htm Biden's son a registered lobbyist since 2001], [[USA Today]]</ref> |
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| − | ===The New Jim Crow===
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| − | :{{Main article|The New Jim Crow}}
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| − | Biden was a staunch opponent of school desegregation in the 1970s and leading crusader for mass incarceration in the 1980s and 1990s. Biden described [[African American]] felons in the aftermath of the Central Park 5 jogger case as 'predators' too [[sociopath]]ic to rehabilitate,<ref>https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/07/politics/biden-1993-speech-predators/index.html</ref> and [[white supremacist]] senators as his friends.
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| − | Biden boasts as one of his greatest legislative achievements passage of the 1994 Crime bill which locked up 10% of the Black adult male population of the United States.<ref name="nytimes.com"/><ref>http://www.prisonpolicy.org/research/incarceration_rates_growth_causes/</ref>
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| − | When [[President George H.W. Bush]] asked for a record increase in funding to fight the [[War on Drugs]], Biden told a TV interviewer {{Quotebox|"In a nutshell, the President's plan does not include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/1989-09-06/news/mn-1646_1_drug-war</ref><ref>http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/first-step-act-skepticism.html</ref>}} [[File:1994 Superpredator Act.jpg|right|350px|thumb|The Superpredator Act of 1994. Feinstein, Kerry and Biden are clearly visible with President Clinton. The bill is known for its sentencing disparities which led to mass incarceration of Blacks.<ref>https://fair.org/home/senate-crime-bill-unscrutinized-by-the-press/</ref>]] Biden, [[Ted Kennedy]], and [[Strom Thurmond]] worked on proposals that raised maximum penalties, removed a directive requiring the US Sentencing Commission to take into account prison capacity, and created the cabinet-level “drug czar” position. In 1984, they passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which, among other things, abolished [[parole]], imposed a less generous cap on “good time” sentence reductions, and allowed the Sentencing Commission to issue more punitive guidelines.
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| − | Biden bragged on the Senate floor that it was under his and Thurmond's leadership that Congress passed a law sending anyone caught with a rock of cocaine the size of a quarter to jail for a minimum of five years - the notoriously racist hundred-to-one sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. In the same speech Biden took credit for [[civil asset forfeiture]] and seizure laws, and demanded to know why [[Papa Bush]] hadn't sentenced more drug dealers to life in prison or exercise the [[death penalty]] once Congress had given him that power.<ref name="c-span.org"/>
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| − | Biden's version of a new crime bill added more than forty crimes that would be eligible for the [[death penalty]]. Biden boasted “we do everything but hang people for jaywalking.”<ref name="books.google.com"/> The [[NAACP]] and other groups lobbied against the bill.<ref>https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/27/us/civil-libertarians-go-after-crime-bills.html</ref> Although the 1991 crime bill was defeated by Republicans, the 1994 Biden/Clinton crime bill was passed.<ref>''[https://books.google.com/books?id=SGUJBAAAQBAJ&lpg=PT142&dq=biden%20strongly%20believes%20the%20administration%20needs%20to%20seize%20control%20of%20the%20issue%20by%20upping%20the%20ante&pg=PT142#v=onepage&q=biden%20strongly%20believes%20the%20administration%20needs%20to%20seize%20control%20of%20the%20issue%20by%20upping%20the%20ante&f=false The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America]'', Naomi Murakawa.</ref>
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| − | By 2001, the United States had the highest rate of incarceration in the world. [[Human Rights Watch]] reported that in seven states, African Americans constituted 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders even though they were no more likely than whites to use or sell illegal drugs. Prison admissions for drug offenses reached a level in 2000 for African Americans more than 26 times the level they had been under [[Ronald Reagan]].<ref>[https://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-does-not-deserve-black-peoples-votes/ Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote], Michelle Alexander, ''The Nation'', February 10, 2016</ref> Biden's "social planning" had proven effective.
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| − | In May 2019 journalist and historian Shaun King observed, {{Quotebox|I’ve heard a very dangerous lie being told about how the systems of mass incarceration were built in this nation. I didn’t expect to have to respond this way because I didn’t expect Joe Biden to lie about the 1994 Crime Bill. He wrote it. He fought for it. And the results were devastating. Every single expert on this topic agrees.<br><br>This week Joe Biden took the stance that not only is he not sorry for the Crime Bill, but that it didn’t even increase mass incarceration. And it’s shameful because either he’s willfully lying, which is horrible, or he’s just plain ignorant about the true impact of the bill, which is also horrible. Either way, I have a major problem with it because these laws are still in effect and they are doing damage in our communities every single day, 24 hours a day.<ref>https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/videos/688203931610804/</ref>}}
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| − | The Leftist ''Jacobin'' magazine summed up Biden's record: {{Quotebox|"It’s not as if Biden didn’t know what he was doing.... He just didn’t care. Biden had made a calculated decision that the elections he would win were worth the damage he inflicted....<br>But even if Biden has subsequently learned the error of his ways, the rank cynicism and callousness involved in his two-decade-long championing of carceral policies should be more than enough to give anyone pause about his qualities as a leader, let alone a [[progressive]] one."<ref>https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/08/biden-crime-mass-incarceration-police-prisons</ref>}}
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| | === Joe Biden, his struggles with grief and his unresolved emotional wounds === | | === Joe Biden, his struggles with grief and his unresolved emotional wounds === |