FAIR: 'These Executions, Disturbing as They Are, Have Flown Largely Under the Radar'

 

View article on FAIR's website 'These Executions, Disturbing as They Are, Have Flown Largely Under the Radar' JANINE JACKSON   Janine Jackson interviewed  the Intercept’s Liliana Segura about Trump’s execution spree for the December 4, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. MP3 Link Snopes (11/30/20) Janine Jackson: It's so astonishing—at a time we feel ourselves nearly numb to astonishment—that it generated a Snopes factcheck: Could it be that the Trump administration executed more people in five months than the federal government executed during the previous five decades? It is true; and indeed, things are at such a pass that it's almost eerie that Trump isn't bragging night and noon about the spree of state killings—three in four days over the summer, and now ramping up to a level unprecedented from a lame-duck White House since the days of Grover Cleveland, who had been, law professor Austin Sarat reminded recently in Slate, an executioner himself as a New York sheriff. Not content to schedule state killings practically up to the day Biden takes office, Trump's Justice Department has also just changed the rules to allow executions by electrocution and firing squad—this at a time when many states have abolished the death penalty, and more and more people say they oppose it. Our next guest has reported on the death penalty, sentencing and US prisons for much longer than Trump has been in office. Investigative journalist Liliana Segura now reports for the Intercept. She joins us now by phone from Nashville. Welcome to CounterSpin, Liliana Segura. Liliana Segura: Hi, thanks for having me. JJ: As with a lot of things, it feels like we're moving in two different directions. More people, if still not a majority, say the death penalty is morally unacceptable. The data has kind of sunk in that its application, anyway, is unfair and racist, and not a deterrent to crime. But then when individual cases come up, it becomes a different category of story, if you will, and statistics matter less than “What if it were your sister?” You've been doing, as I say, this reporting since before Donald Trump and Bill Barr. I just wonder how you've approached the terrain of this issue, and what you're making of the present moment? Intercept (7/29/19) LS: It's been a very surreal time to be covering these executions. As you highlighted, I've written about the death penalty a lot, for many, many years. And actually, one of the bizarre aspects of my work in recent years has been that since I moved to Nashville, about five years ago, the state of Tennessee has actually carried out a large number of executions. And the last several of those were carried out using the electric chair. Although I haven't witnessed those executions, a number of my local friends and colleagues in the media have. Outside of our local bubble, and I think more broadly, I don't think Americans quite realize just how much we've tolerated a system that continues to use things like the electric chair, which, when it was announced that the Trump administration was looking to bring back the electric chair and firing squads, it really generated a fair amount of revulsion among a lot of people who seemed sort of unaware, or maybe haven't thought about these issues in a long time. So I think we run the risk a little bit of putting these federal executions in the context of this horrifying, violent Trump era, which has broken so many norms that we're accustomed to. And yet when you look at different states, when you look at what's been happening in Tennessee, we've been pretty violent in the past several years, and tolerating quite a bit as Americans when it comes to these more mundane executions from day to day and year to year. So part of my project, when William Barr announced that they were looking to restart federal executions after more than 15 years, my task was to remind myself of the history that underpins this federal system. We hadn't seen a federal execution since 2003. So the first piece that I wrote was actually going back and reexamining how we got here. And so much of that story really is about the Democrats, frankly, and is about the era of the 1994 crime bill, and the vast expansion of federal prosecutions, federal death sentences, as a result of that crime bill. So it's been an interesting time to see through the election, now entering a Biden administration—Joe Biden famously having authored much of the crime bill—to see what's going to happen next. Biden now claims to oppose the death penalty, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that plays out in terms of meaningful action. JJ: Absolutely. You don't have to dig too far to find Biden saying we do “everything but hang people for jaywalking” in this bill. He was very much for it before he was against it. It seems like the death penalty is an issue in this country where the country moves, as I would say, forward and then back. We start to act like every other so-called developed country, and then someone like Lester Maddox pops up and says, “They're getting away with murder!,” you know, and it swings back again. And as part of that, media and politicians characterize points of view without actual human beings attached, you know: “Victims deserve better." "Criminals can’t be helped.” It can get very sloppy and very strawman, which is why I think reporting, as you do, simple witnessing, is important. But there are particular hurdles to that kind of reporting, aren't there? LS: Absolutely. When Trump was elected, a lot of us kind of knew; we were like, “OK, this is a guy is very pro–death penalty, he’s going to choose a very pro–death penalty attorney general.” We knew that federal executions were likely to return under Trump. What I never could have anticipated, certainly what none of us could have, would have been that these executions would be carried out with such a vengeance, but also in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic. US Penitentiary, Terre Haute, Indiana And a huge part of the challenge of reporting on this moment has been navigating the danger, frankly, and risk of traveling during a pandemic, of doing this reporting during a pandemic. I happen to be based in Nashville, which gives me an advantage; I just have to drive the four hours up to Terre Haute to be on the ground for these executions. But a huge number of my media colleagues who have not been similarly positioned haven't come, and have had to choose to protect themselves and not try to make that trip to Terre Haute during these last few months. I'll also add that, while the DoJ and BoP have have taken steps to provide protective equipment, masks, sanitizer, all of that, to the press who do come, especially to witnessing reporters, they've also laid down some pretty arbitrary rules about what people are allowed to do and not do in order to protect themselves. So one of the things I find most disturbing, and that I've grappled with every time I apply to be a witness for these executions, is the fact that they don't want reporters bringing their own masks. For me, that makes a difference, especially now, between applying to be a witness and accepting that role if I'm chosen, and not. And I think journalists who have had to witness repeatedly—there's one local reporter in Terre Haute who has witnessed all eight executions, and will almost certainly witness the rest—they take that job on as part of their professional obligation, but assuming quite a bit of risk and danger that really shouldn't be necessary to do their jobs. JJ: Of course, every difficulty, every hurdle for reporters means a loss for the public in terms of information. We hear that prisons used to be in the center of town, that people were hanged in the square. And there's all kinds of things you can say about that, but the implication is that transparency has been important. And now we really hide this part of what's done in our names. And that's partly why the witnessing is so important. But it's also why it seems so critical to be able to ground the conversation in data, in information. And on that note, I wanted you to tell us a bit about the project that you've worked on with Jordan Smith and others at the Intercept. What is the scope of that? And how do you hope that that project would be used? Intercept (12/3/19) LS: I should preface this just by saying that Jordan and I, neither of us are “data people,” and so that project was quite an undertaking on a number of different levels. This project really started back in 2016. Essentially, we set out to try to take stock of the death penalty, writ large, as it exists in its current state. The impetus for the project at the time was the anniversary of the landmark decision in Gregg v. Georgia, which is when the US Supreme Court, in 1976, determined that after a four-year moratorium that came about because of flawed death penalty laws throughout the country, that essentially enough reforms had ensured that the death penalty could now be carried out in an equitable and fair way; there were enough protections to ensure that "the system worked." And so since 1976 onwards, that's what we call the so-called modern death penalty era. Yet we know, Jordan knows—through years of reporting, through seeing exonerations of innocent people who were sent to death row, the data pointing to systemic racism throughout the system as a whole—we knew that if we were to start to look at, not only who was still on death row in this country, or who has been executed, for that matter, in recent years, but the whole picture of who has been sentenced since 1976, and what has happened with those sentences, where those people have ended up, that would provide a much fuller picture of the failures and shortcomings of this system. And so, in a moment of what feels like temporary madness, we decided we were going to try to collect the data from all remaining death penalty states, to basically just ask for information about all the people sentenced to death from 1976 to the present, and their status. We knew that the vast majority of those people would not have been executed, because what we see is that people on death row spend decades, often die of natural causes, oftentimes they are resentenced, people many times take their own life on death row. And so we wanted to get a bigger overview of what this system looked like. So it took literally years to collect and analyze this data. One of the big takeaways that I suppose shouldn't be surprising, but which is nonetheless disturbing  when you consider the power of the state in taking a human life, is the fact that the recordkeeping was just pretty bad, really, really shoddy, really incomplete, just a lot of confusing, basic questions that were not answered in our first attempts to collect this data. I will say that there is absolutely no question that the data shows overrepresentation of people of color, especially Black people, on federal death row, and we're starting to see how that's playing out now: Of the five people who are set to be executed before Joe Biden's inauguration, four of them are Black men, and the other is the only woman on federal death row, Lisa Montgomery. So it's pretty striking, and there's still a lot to learn from that dataset. JJ: I appreciate the layperson approach, if you will, because it should be legible to non-statisticians; it should be information that can be understood. And then the other thing that leaps out at me is, you have to combine the fact that the recordkeeping is so bad with the repeated assurances that the death penalty is being applied, as it were, surgically; that it's the “worst of the worst,” as the horrible overused phrase is. The fact that the data is opaque, that the data is erratic and incomplete, is a statement in itself. LS: Yeah, that was one of our big takeaways as well. It's really an indictment of this lack of seriousness with which we treat these fundamental powers of government; there's a lack of interest or curiosity, or just an unwillingness to engage with that, that reality of so many Americans. And I learn that again and again in my reporting, just the fact that these executions, as disturbing as  they are, have flown largely under the radar; a lot of people are unaware that they're even happening. And I want to also say that in my recent interviews, those people who are unaware include some of the original prosecutors in the cases that are now coming up for execution. It's become a bit disturbing to me, how little some of those prosecutors, who are largely retired, how little they've followed these cases to their conclusion, the fact that it was just part of their career, and they've moved on, while the victims that they promised closure to have been hanging on, and oftentimes waiting for decades, to see this all play out. It's really bothered me in recent days. JJ: Finally, the death penalty has a finality, an irreversibility, that for many people set it apart. But we should be wary, shouldn't we, of imagining that an equally certain but slower death in solitary confinement without possibility of parole is somehow a feel-good alternative. We can't just have a piece of this conversation about the continuum of cruelty that's reflected in our criminal system. And I know your concerns are expansive in that way; it's important to contextualize the death penalty. It's not like it's the one bad thing the system does. LS: Yeah, that's exactly right, and thank you for bringing that up. That's something that fortunately, I think, we've started to see a little bit of change in the broader landscape around the way people see what I call “permanent sentencing.” I was struck, during the primaries, when everything was so heated, that Elizabeth Warren, I believe, got into a little bit of trouble at one point where she kind of said—and I don't remember the precise context—but essentially, gave support for the idea that life without parole is an appropriate sentence, I believe, as an alternative to the death penalty. And at least on Twitter and social media, a lot of people jumped all over this comment, to say that this was almost as bad, it’s a form of torture, that we shouldn't support life without parole. And I gotta say, as somebody who's been covering life without parole and the death penalty for years and years, that is different. It was not people's sort of knee-jerk response to the notion that “LWOP,” as we call it, is an appropriate alternative. The anti–death penalty movement for many years has pushed life without parole—in my mind, erroneously—as the default, acceptable alternative to state-sanctioned murder. And those issues have generated a fair amount of debate and tension. But I think that the broader culture, at least in the context of the primaries, has kind of come around on questioning that as well, and I think solitary confinement and that form of torture is a big part of that, as you lay out. Can I say one more thing about transparency? JJ:  Say it. Liliana Segura: "Family members of the condemned are often erased and have been, for the most part, throughout this process, and I try to really keep that at the center of my work." LS: One other thing that’s really been on my mind when it comes to the lack of transparency, and the managing of the narrative on the part of the federal government, is I've really been struck, going back and forth to Terre Haute, by the ways in which the Department of Justice controls the narrative to such a degree that it's got a very rigid system for enabling reporters’ access to certain people involved in these executions. And you highlighted, rightfully, the way in which people, when confronted with the horror of these crimes, say, “What if it was your loved one?” And so reporters have, on occasion, had access to the victim's family members after the execution. What happens is, the witnessing press comes back, people are allowed into this media room, and those family members who have witnessed come and are given a forum to address reporters. Sometimes reporters ask questions, and it's very moving, it’s very sad. And the family, oftentimes, thanks the Trump administration, says that justice has been served. And it's part of this process. And yet, there is no equivalent, there is no forum for the loved ones of the people who are put to death; in fact, they are explicitly not allowed in the media center. And to the extent that we've heard from loved ones of people put to death in Terre Haute, it's only been because activists have staked out, literally sued, actually, to gain access to a field across from the penitentiary, next to a Dollar General, where where they have come to hold vigils and protests, but also these kind of mini-press conferences featuring spiritual advisors and, in the case of Christopher Vialva, the mother of Christopher Vialva, who witnessed his execution. And I've thought a lot about that, because it was the first time Christopher Vialva's mother was able to address reporters, but also express her sorrow and condolences for the family of the victims in that case, and it was a very moving moment, and yet not one that was officially sanctioned, not one that would ever be enabled by the federal government. So family members of the condemned are often erased and have been, for the most part, throughout this process, and I try to really keep that at the center of my work. It's the reason I approach my stories with an eye towards including, when I can, the voices of the families on the other side, who are also losing a loved one in this process. JJ: We've been speaking with Liliana Segura. You can find her work online at TheIntercept.com. Liliana Segura, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin. LS: Thank you so much for having me, and for covering this issue.

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RSN: Jeff Cohen | Politicians of Color Should Not Be Immune From Criticism

03 July 20

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RSN: Jeff Cohen | Politicians of Color Should Not Be Immune From Criticism

Jeff Cohen, Reader Supported News
Cohen writes: "To me, being an anti-racist activist means that one consistently challenges the structures of racist exclusion, exploitation, repression and incarceration."

It does not mean that one must defend or praise establishment politicians of color.

Forty years ago, I was an activist and leader in the battle against police racism, brutality, and repression in Los Angeles. At the time, L.A. had a black mayor, its first in history: former police officer Tom Bradley. He was a huge improvement over the previous mayor, who was an overt racist – and progressives and liberals of all colors had worked hard to get Bradley elected.

But in the fight against police murder and racism, Mayor Bradley was as much an obstacle as he was an ally. Being on the side of communities of color meant standing shoulder to shoulder with black and Latinx activists, not shoulder to shoulder with the mayor.

In Martin Luther King’s last book, written in 1967 a year before he was assassinated, he described how “the white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders.” Writing about “corruption” of a type of “Negro leader,” King declared: “Ultimately he changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white man’s representative to the Negro. The tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him." 

It was a blunt and blistering assessment, written at a time when there were few African American mayors, and a grand total of seven blacks in the U.S. Congress.

Let’s be clear: African American politicians have been no more – and usually less – corrupt than white politicians (even though law enforcement has often singled them out for corruption prosecution). It goes without saying that, as a whole, black elected officials have been more progressive than white officials not just on issues of race, but also economics, gender equality, militarism, civil liberties, etc.

Beginning a decade after King’s last book, we’ve experienced 40 years of corrupting neoliberal capitalism – a period in which racial and economic disparities have ballooned, as giant corporations have seized greater control over the economy and both major political parties. Using lavish campaign donations, ads, friendly media, think tanks, and astroturfing, it's been a special project of corporate interests to move the Democratic leadership to the right on issues of taxation, budget priorities, healthcare, jobs, trade, and corporate power in general.

In the last years of King’s life, he and other black leaders were unabashedly allied with reform and insurgent forces that challenged the Democratic Party establishment.

In recent years, many African American leaders have been on the establishment side of the Democratic Party, resisting progressive insurgencies. This development was on dramatic display in February 2016, when the Congressional Black Caucus PAC held a news conference to endorse Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders (AP video here). Congressman Cedric Richmond ridiculed Sanders’s healthcare and education policies as unaffordable and “too good to be true.” Wall Street-allied congressman Gregory Meeks hailed Clinton as a strong “partner” on “issues important to our constituents.”

At the news conference, Rep. John Lewis made a remarkable juxtaposition when he invoked his own heroic leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee “for three years, from 1963 to 1966.” Referring to Sanders, Lewis said: “I never saw him. I never met him.” But, he said, “I met Hillary Clinton.”

The grievously unfair comment sparked immediate pushback, since Sanders’s civil rights activism in Chicago is well documented, including his 1963 arrest (and his participation weeks later in the March on Washington, where both King and Lewis were speakers). By contrast, when Lewis chaired SNCC, Clinton was a self-described “Goldwater Girl” – a high school activist for Republican Barry Goldwater, who fervently opposed the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. Years later, as First Lady, Clinton spoke of “superpredators” while promoting the notorious 1994 Crime Bill.

Again, this election cycle, many influential black leaders endorsed corporate establishment candidate Joe Biden, despite a record on racial issues – from helping to write the Crime Bill to his collaboration with segregationist senators – worse than Hillary Clinton’s. These endorsements, like that of House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, were crucial in Biden securing the nomination, especially in gaining the votes of older African Americans. No matter where these black leaders stand now on reform versus the corporate status quo, many, like Rep. Clyburn, are highly regarded for civil rights activism going back decades.  

As progressives in a country with a long, grim history of racism continuing to the present day, it’s our responsibility to fight racism everywhere we see it. It’s also our job to persist in demands for justice, even when some of the mayors or Congress members we will be persisting against are politicians of color. Given the horrific record of whites telling people of color “we know what’s best,” that persistence must be pursued with sensitivity and humility. But it must be pursued.

More than 50 years have passed since the death of Dr. King, when just seven members of Congress were African Americans. After decades of struggle by activists and leaders of color (and white allies), government is fortunately far more diverse today.

If King were with us, would he still be complaining about black leaders who change from being representatives of their community to the white establishment into the establishment’s representative to the black community?

Or would he be complaining even louder?

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Jeff Cohen is co-founder of the activism group RootsAction.org and founder of the media watch group FAIR. In Los Angeles 40 years ago, he was one of four co-chairs of the Campaign for a Citizens’ Police Review Board, and an ACLU attorney challenging police spying.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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The Case Against Joe Biden: How the Former VP Fueled Mass Incarceration and Protected Big Banks

We continue our conversation with Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor for Harper’s magazine, about what he sees as Biden’s dangerous track record, from his 1994 crime bill to his close ties with big banks. Cockburn’s latest piece is headlined “No Joe! Joe Biden’s disastrous legislative legacy.”

FOCUS: Joe Biden Pushed Ronald Reagan to Ramp Up Incarceration - Not the Other Way Around

07 March 20

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FOCUS: Joe Biden Pushed Ronald Reagan to Ramp Up Incarceration - Not the Other Way Around

David Stein, The Intercept
Stein writes: "Joe Biden this weekend continued to draw attention to the complicated role he has played in the country's history of race relations. On Thursday night, he drew criticism when he was asked what Americans can do about the legacy of slavery, and answered by suggesting parents put on a record player for kids, and that social workers should visit parents' homes to teach them how to care for their children."

oe Biden this weekend continued to draw attention to the complicated role he has played in the country’s history of race relations. On Thursday night, he drew criticism when he was asked what Americans can do about the legacy of slavery, and answered by suggesting parents put on a record player for kids, and that social workers should visit parents’ homes to teach them how to care for their children. He followed that by recounting on Sunday his run-in in the 1960s with a young gang leader named “Corn Pop,” a story that involved “the only white guy” at a city pool cutting him a 6-foot piece of chain to defend himself against the razor-wielding teen and his friends.

The politics of race relations have been a central part of Biden’s career, from his high-profile opposition to busing to his authoring of the 1994 Biden Crime Bill. When he talks about his criminal justice record on the campaign trail, he argues today that the focus on the ’94 bill is unfair, because the real rise in mass incarceration happened at the state level and was long underway by then.

Biden is correct that the surge began in the 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s, but a closer look at his role reveals that it was Biden who was among the principal and earliest movers of the policy agenda that would become the war on drugs and mass incarceration, and he did so in the face of initial reluctance from none other than President Ronald Reagan. Indeed, Reagan even vetoed a signature piece of Biden legislation, which he drafted with arch segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, to create a federal “drug czar.”

At the time, many Republicans were hesitant about increasing federal spending, and in fact looking for ways to slash the budget. Domestically, Reagan wanted to focus on cutting taxes and reducing social welfare spending, and had little interest in an expansive federal spending program geared toward building new prisons and hiring new police. Biden, on the other hand, was a key policy leader among both parties on the issue of expanding funding to states and municipalities for policing and prisons.

As governor of California, Reagan had been an infamous proponent for law-and-order politics, but when he ran for president in 1980 against incumbent Jimmy Carter, crime was not a significant issue in the race. Rather, the 1980 election focused largely on the economy, inflation, and unemployment.

Biden, meanwhile, was criticizing Carter for not fighting the war on drugs forcefully enough. “I’m trying to alarm the policymakers,” he told the Washington Post months before the 1980 election. “I’m saying that business as usual won’t work.”

Although mass imprisonment is and was primarily driven by states, at the federal level Biden shaped the punitive political culture of the 1980s and 1990s by reviving a policy agenda that was briefly in decline at the end of the 1970s. In three years under Carter, the federal prison population fell by a quarter, even as it was rising at the state level. By the final days of the Carter administration, the federal program that provided resources to states for policing and imprisonment, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, or LEAA, was being dismantled.

In the weeks after the election, Biden argued that the problem with LEAA was inadequate coordination and poor management, and that the federal government should take a more assertive stance in this area while continuing to provide funds to states to expand their police and prison systems. “The American people believe we have waged war on crime and failed,” Biden, who was the U.S. senator for Delaware at the time, said. “Therefore, they concluded that nothing can be done about it.” In his view, though, federal funding was an essential piece of the drug war. He saw the need for a program like LEAA, but it needed a stronger manager in charge: a drug czar.

Alongside Reagan’s entry into office, Republicans wrested control of the Senate from the Democrats. South Carolina Democrat-turned-Republican Thurmond replaced Ted Kennedy as Judiciary Committee chair, and Kennedy ceded the ranking spot to Biden. Biden had previously locked horns with Kennedy as they competed to lead the party on crime, with Biden wanting to shed the party’s image as being soft. “As most old-line Democrats view it, the only ways we can deal with violence will have a negative impact on civil rights and liberties. … I think that’s malarkey,” he told the New York Times.

“Give me the crime issue … and you’ll never have trouble with it in an election,” Biden was said to have begged party leadership during meetings. With his new position of power on the committee, he began to shape its agenda accordingly.

As they each started their new roles on the Judiciary Committee, Biden approached Thurmond privately to sort out their shared priorities. Biden brought with him a 90-page draft bill and a promise: “If you keep your right-wing guys from killing this bill, I’ll keep the liberals off the bill. And if you and I stand fast and agree on what we can agree on and just hold firm, we can pass this thing,” Biden told the committee chair.

At the time, the White House and Nancy Reagan were also beginning to focus on drugs and crime, but the president saw little need for increased federal funding. Due to its cost, he had recently scuttled a proposed prison expansion plan from his Attorney General’s Task Force on Violent Crime.

Biden disapproved of Reagan’s plan to scale back funding for crime fighting, complaining in October 1981 about inadequate money to combat drug trafficking. The Coast Guard “just doesn’t have as many boats as the bad guys,” he said. “The boats just aren’t as good.” Biden had joined with some of his Republican colleagues to offer the administration more money to spend on crime. Biden excoriated what he dubbed the White House’s “budgeteers” for the paltry funding being offered to the FBI. “You are cutting not only the muscle, but the bone,” he told the attorney general.

Throughout Reagan’s first two years in office, Biden frequently criticized him for shortchanging the war on crime and drugs. In June 1981, Biden spoke before a House committee hearing on budget cuts to drug enforcement. “I, personally, am getting tired of rhetoric about the war on violent crime and the war on drugs. … These types of budget cuts certainly would seem to contradict a serious effort to develop a federal drug strategy,” he said. “My patience for action in the drug arena by this administration is beginning to waiver. Just as I criticized the Carter administration for a lack of innovative ideas in this area I will criticize this administration if promises and rhetoric are not soon replaced by results,” he continued.

In September 1982, Biden gave a nationally broadcast Democratic response to the president’s weekly radio address. He accused Reagan of “unnecessary budget cuts” to crime funding. “Violent crime is as real a threat to our national security as any foreign threat,” he said. “We have a military budget of $253 billion in 1983, and yet in 1983, we’ll spend less than $3 billion a year to fight crime.” He then called on the federal government to support “state and local police agencies by training their people and giving them more money.”

The Biden-Thurmond bill increased penalties for drugs, including expanding civil asset forfeiture; created a sentencing commission; and eradicated parole at the federal level. It sought to limit access to bail — a provision denounced by the ACLU for “revers[ing] the presumption of innocence.” After the bill passed by huge majorities in the Senate and House (with the parole and bail provisions removed by the House), a question lingered: Would the president, who had in recent months agreed to pursue crime legislation largely in line with the Biden-Thurmond bill, sign it? Reagan had a major sticking point: He opposed Biden’s desired “drug czar” position. Despite a lobbying blitz from Biden and Thurmond, which Biden memorialized in his eulogy for the South Carolina senator, and despite Biden’s support of Reagan’s tax cuts and slashing of social welfare spending, Reagan vetoed the Biden-Thurmond bill, even while advisers fretted about undermining the president’s tough on crime credentials.

Biden, who was the ranking Democrat on the committee from 1981 to 1987, and then chaired it until 1995, continued on this trajectory: shaping many of the laws that would in a sense recreate LEAA and institutionalize a federal drug war. A number of the priorities from the 1982 Biden-Thurmond bill would eventually become law. Biden shaped the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which curtailed access to bail; eliminated parole; created a sentencing commission; expanded civil asset forfeiture; and increased funding for states. Biden helped lead the push for the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which lengthened sentences for many offenses, created the infamous 100:1 crack versus cocaine sentencing disparity, and provided new funds for the escalating drug war. Eventually, with his co-sponsorship of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, his long-sought-after drug czar position was created. These and other laws lengthened sentences at the federal level and contributed to an explosion of federal imprisonment — from 24,000 people locked up in 1980 to almost 216,000 in 2013. In short, these laws increased the likelihood that more people would end up in cages and for longer.

In 1989, Biden criticized President George Bush’s anti-drug efforts as “not tough enough, bold enough or imaginative enough. The president says he wants to wage a war on drugs, but if that’s true, what we need is another D-Day, not another Vietnam, not a limited war, fought on the cheap.” Then, in 1994, he pushed through the massive crime bill, which authorized more than $30 billion of spending, largely devoted to expanding state prisons and local police forces. He bragged of his accomplishments in a 1994 report: The “first [national] drug strategy sought a total of $350 million in federal aid to state and local law enforcement, with states matching the federal assistance dollar for dollar. The first drug strategy I offered—in January 1990—called for more than $1 billion in aid to state and local law enforcement—a controversial view at the time.”

As Biden pushed Republicans to spend more on policing and prisons, he was part of a wave of “New Democrats” pushing the party in evermore punitive directions. Now, with upward of one in every two families having suffered the harms of mass incarceration, Biden says he worries that “too many people are incarcerated.”

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