Activists Want Hillary Clinton to Speak Up Now About Why Black Lives Matter
Hillary Clinton waited almost three weeks after unarmed black teen Michael Brown was shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last summer to comment on the tragedy. The unexplained delay led criminal justice reform advocates such as the Rev. Al Sharpton to publicly question her silence—though the former senator and first lady has been out of public office since Feb. 2013, and even then, in her role as secretary of state she did not often comment on domestic issues. Now that she has officially announced her run for the presidency in 2016, some black voters are calling into question her dedication to addressing the excessive use of force by law enforcement that has left many more dead since Brown.
As recently as December, she’s taken up the mantra that many a protester has uttered—“Yes, black lives matter,” she told The Robert F Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights in December.
Yet, Clinton’s record from when she first came to national politics as a vocal first lady could haunt her path to the White House. She was an early supporter of a now-maligned crime bill passed by Congress in 1994 that increased federal funding for the construction of prisons, created new offense categories punishable by the death penalty, established harsher penalties for certain juvenile offenders, and put 100,000 more cops on the beat.
In December however, she seemed to change her tune when she spoke at the Massachusetts Conference for Women and reflected again on the police-involved deaths of Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York. Sharing the oft-cited statistic about the U.S. having only 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s prison population, Clinton said the criminal justice system was “out of balance” and opined that perhaps in the wake of such tragic deaths, the country could come together to “find our balance again.”
Still, it’s hard to guess what sort of balance she’s hoping to strike, as she never introduced or supported any legislation as a New York senator that involved criminal justice reform.
In today’s political climate, where bipartisan allies such as the Koch Brothers, Newt Gingrich, Cory Booker, and Attorney General Eric Holder are coming together to collaborate on criminal justice reform, Clinton’s tough-on-crime past may not play well with some voters. Two decades later, some proponents of the crime bill have acknowledged that the harsh-on-crime approach of the mid-1990s is largely responsible for today’s soaring prison populations. “We made some terrible mistakes,” Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told NPR last year. In 1994, Travis was a member of President Bill Clinton’s justice department and attended the signing of the bill.
“We need more police, we need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders,” Hillary Clinton said at a 1994 conference for women in policing. “The three strikes and you’re out for violent offenders has to be part of the plan. We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets.”
Speaking in Iowa in 2007, she admitted the negative impact of the crime bill, acknowledging the legislation’s hand in an “unacceptable increase in incarceration across the board” and noting that it was time to take stock of the harsh sentences and penalties introduced by the bill. She expressed an interest in programs that divert certain offenders away from the prison system—something that reformers have been calling for, too.
Related stories on TakePart:
• Hillary Clinton Minivans Her Presidential Campaign to Iowa
• Ferguson Reacts: Officer Who Shot Michael Brown Won't Face Charges
• Should Elizabeth Warren Challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Nomination?
Original article from TakePart
