By: Cliff Kincaid |
During Thursday night’s Democratic debate,
the two candidates tried to outdo each other in terms of being soft on
crime and advocating the release of criminals. It was an illustration of
how Democratic Party policies have gone from pro-police to anti-police,
and even pro-criminal.
If this is the current trend in the Democratic Party, the Clintons will have to hire some illegal aliens to remodel the “Making Communities Safer” section of
the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas. I toured the
place last Thursday and noticed that the library highlights the
tough-on-crime policies of the Clinton administration, including the
building of prisons.
I
took pictures of the exhibit, as anybody from the media can do, and it
proclaims, “For eight years, the Clinton Administration pursued the two
objectives of tougher punishment and smarter prevention—combining stiff
penalties and more police with innovative programs for youth and
commonsense gun laws.”
One part of the exhibit highlights how “prison construction” accelerated under President Clinton.
“In
the early 1990s, there were not enough prison cells to house America’s
expanding population of state and federal prisoners,” it says. However,
“With the passage of the 1994 crime bill, for the first time in history
the federal government helped states build the prison space they
needed.”
It sounds like “mass incarceration” to me.
All
of this is now supposed to be disavowed, as the Democratic Party and
its presidential candidates become adjuncts of the criminals lobby known
as “Black Lives Matter.”
At
the debate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “I want
white people to recognize that there is systemic racism. It’s also in
employment, it’s in housing, but it is in the criminal justice system,
as well.”
The
other white person on the stage, socialist Senator Bernie Sanders
(I-VT), countered that Mrs. Clinton’s one-time use of the term
“superpredator” to describe black criminals was “a racist term, and
everybody knew it was a racist term.” She used that term when the 1994
crime bill, sponsored by then-Senator, and now Obama Vice President, Joe
Biden (D-DE), was passed.
Sanders
and Clinton now favor releasing hundreds of thousands of criminals in
the name of “criminal justice reform.” Clinton has apologized for using
the term “superpredators.”
In
order to fulfill his campaign promise to “Black Lives Matter,” Sanders
“would have to release roughly half a million prisoners,” noted Errol
Louis of NY1 Time Warner Cable News, during the debate. He asked, “How
are you going to do that, since the vast majority of American prisoners
are not under federal jurisdiction?” Incredibly, Sanders said he would
work with state governments and conservatives to release the criminals.
Sanders said the criminals would be given “the kind of job training and
education they need so they can return to their communities.”
It
appears that the law-abiding citizens in those communities would have
to fend for themselves, since the “Ferguson effect” has caused the
police to pull back from confronting criminals. As a result, homicides
are already rising in major cities.
It
is apparent that the Democratic candidates for president are falling
all over themselves in an effort to appear soft on crime and tough on
white racism.
Both
seem to believe that highlighting black crime is now considered racist,
and that white racism is actually the real problem in black communities
that have been devastated by black criminals.
By
contrast, the webpage for the Clinton Presidential Library notes the
importance of the 1994 crime bill, which was actually effective.
The
idea of “community policing” was “important to the bill,” the exhibit
says. “It called for police to be present and recognizable within
higher-crime areas of towns in order to gain the trust and respect of
local residents. As a result of this emphasis on public safety, crime
rates fell every year that President Clinton was in office, eventually
reaching a 27-year low by the end of his administration.”
In this current campaign, of course, the terms “tougher punishment” and “stiff penalties” would be considered racist.
“Black
Lives Matter” wants people to believe these are terms that justify
racism against minorities and lead to “mass incarceration.”
Will
this section of the Clinton Presidential Library have to be remodeled
or torn down to accommodate the language that is now popular in the
Democratic Party?
In
contrast to the Clinton policies of the 1990s, today’s Democratic Party
wants to release black criminals from prison because they have
allegedly been singled out by white racists.
But
the Clinton Presidential Library says the results of Clinton’s
tough-on-crime policies were “dramatic,” and it features this quotation
by President Clinton on September 13, 1994:
“If
the American people do not feel safe on their streets, in their
schools, in their homes, in their place of work and worship, then it is
difficult to say that the American people are free.”
Today,
however, this is not something to be applauded. We are led to believe
it was a terrible time for America because black criminals went to
prison as a result of racism, not because of their criminal behavior.
The
exhibit at the Clinton Presidential Library says, “In the 30 years
before President Clinton took office, violent crime in America had more
than tripled.” It says President Clinton “sought to restore a sense of
responsibility both to government and to the people who lived in
troubled communities.”
By today’s Democratic Party standards, the term “troubled communities” is racist.
The
library exhibit even features pictures of police patrolling those
troubled communities. Indeed, I counted four different photos of police
in the “Making Communities Safer” section of the library.
Sanders is right, however, that there are some conservatives who want to empty the prisons.
The
so-called “criminal justice reform” bill moving through the Congress
would go a long way toward releasing the hundreds of thousands of
criminals promised by Sanders during the debate. This is why Senator Tom
Cotton (R-AR) is opposing it.
The Numbers USA group comments that
“the legislation being considered by Congress in response to concerns
about overly-long prison sentences for Americans has been crafted to
primarily benefit criminal aliens.”
“As
currently written,” notes Chris Chmielenski, Director of Content and
Activism at Numbers USA, “the legislation would result in the massive
release of criminal aliens from federal prisons into the streets. It
could alternatively be called the Criminal Alien Prison Release Act of
2016, but that bill title probably wouldn’t garner many votes in
Congress.”
He warns that so-called criminal justice reform constitutes “a Trojan horse for yet another kind of amnesty.”
Numbers
USA points out that local American communities, most of them black and
Hispanic, will bear the brunt of the release of these criminals back
into their neighborhoods.
But
“Black Lives Matters” and their puppets running for the Democratic
presidential nomination don’t seem to be too concerned about this.
After
all, the new push is to empty the prisons and put criminals back into
black and Hispanic communities in the name of teaching America a lesson
about white racism.
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