In 1994, Joe Biden Enhanced and Expanded the Death Penalty, Now He’s Against It

Robert Walker

Being woke is an amazing thing because you can simply erase your past.  That’s exactly what President Joe Biden is doing today.  Joe Biden, the compassionate grandpa, boomer, whatever you want to call him now wants to give every human being a second chance at life…unless you’re a baby inside a woman.

Flashback 26 years ago to “tough on crime” Joe Biden.  It was a different time and Joe was not too far removed from saying he doesn’t want black children on his own children’s school bus and was opposing racial jungles in education.  Joe Biden was the champion of the 1994 “Biden Crime Bill” which has been credited as being one of the key contributors to mass incarceration and more people on death row in the United States.

“With Biden’s criminal justice record coming under scrutiny as he runs for president, it’s the mass incarceration provisions that are drawing particular attention as a key example of how Biden helped fuel the exact same policies that criminal justice reformers are trying to reverse,” Vox reported in 2019. “Politically, the legislation was also a chance for Democrats — including the recently elected president, Bill Clinton — to wrestle the issue of crime away from Republicans. Polling suggested Americans were very concerned about high crime back then. And especially after George H.W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election in part by painting Dukakis as “soft on crime,” Democrats were acutely worried that Republicans were beating them on the issue.”

The 1994 Biden Crime Bill also expanded the offenses punishable by death.


“It increased federal crimes subject to the death penalty and enabled juveniles to be tried as adults for violent and firearm-involved federal crimes,” Factcheck.org says of the bill.

Before CNN warmed up to Biden, the network fact-check Biden’s campaign lies that his punitive bill worked.

“Following passage of the 1994 crime bill, incarceration rates in the US continued to rise for more than a decade. Experts however say it’s hard to determine how much of this increase came as a result of the 1994 bill, since incarceration rates had been steadily rising since the early 1970s,” CNN reported. “From 1973 to 2009, the incarceration rate in the US more than quadrupled, from 161 people to 767 per 100,000 nationwide, according to a study by the National Research Council. It’s hard to pin that trend on one particular piece of legislation. “

The bill also created the notion of “three strikes”, a provision that would have much harsher penalties on repeat criminal offenders. Biden’s crime bill, according to CNN also led to the construction of more jails in the form of federal grants for new prisons that imposed “Truth in Sentencing”  policies.  It rewarded states for keeping violent offenders incarcerated.

“Biden’s crime bill required states to pass laws mandating violent offenders serve at least 85% of their sentence before those states could receive TIS grant funds,” CNN stated.

1994 Joe Biden was much different than 2021 Joe Biden.  1994 Biden pushed America’s most sweeping and comprehensive crime bill that expanded the death penalty to include 60 additional crimes, increased sentences for first-time offenders as a matter of deterrence, and grew America’s prison population to the point where we housed 25 percent of the world’s prison population.

 

 

 

 

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