Zaid Jilani — The Truth About Who Is Really Responsible for Our Current Police and Prison State

The shameful complicity of Democratic leaders in creating our out-of-control, militarized police forces.

Remember when Democrats were accused of being "soft on crime"? Remember "law and order Democrats" as part of triangulation?

This is a story that begins when Bill Clinton embraced the law-and-order policies of his Republican predecessors.

The war on drugs morphed into a race war on non-whites, chiefly Blacks and Hispanics.

Clinton was a “New Democrat” – part of a new coalition of Democrats who believed that the liberalism represented by the New Deal and Great Society had run its course, and that Democrats must court Big Business and certain right-wing interest groups in order to forge a new party. 

Included in this policy shift were things like “welfare reform,” the North American Free Trade Agreement, and deregulation of the telecommunications and banking industries. But perhaps Clinton's earliest and most intense shifting of traditional Democratic Party liberalism was with respect to crime. This took the form of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (later commonly known as the crime bill). To helm its passage, Clinton tapped none other than our current vice president, then Senator Joe Biden of Delaware.…

AlterNet

The Truth About Who Is Really Responsible for Our Current Police and Prison State
Zaid Jilani