On Monday, Senator Rand Paul told CBS radio host Dom Giordano that if he were the Republican nominee for president he would attack Hillary Clinton on crime. “I’ll ask Hillary Clinton, what have you done for criminal justice? Your husband passed all the laws that put a generation of black men in prison.”
Paul did not go into detail. If he does, he will discover he is on thin ice. The total federal and state prison population (not broken down by race) grew 49 percent between 1992 (883,593) and 2000 (1,312,354). It would be difficult to establish what portion of this change was caused by Clinton administration actions. Certainly, some administration measures contributed—as did a range of state initiatives. And certainly black men were among those who went to prison in greater numbers during this period—although the reference to putting “a generation of black men in prison” is demagogy.
