Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said he regrets supporting the 1994 crime bill at Thursday’s town hall.
Biden struck a regretful tone about his record of supporting a piece of stronger crime legislation in the 1990s, which the Trump campaign has used to attack him.
“An awful lot of people were jailed for minor drug crimes,” ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos began. “Was it a mistake to support it?”
“Yes, it was,” Biden said. “But here’s where the mistake came. The mistake came in terms of what the states did locally.”
Biden, describing the results of the legislation, pointed out disparities in sentencing between black and white men.
“So, we set up a sentencing commission, we didn’t set the time, every single solitary maximum was reduced in there. But what happened was, it became the same time for the same crime. So it said you have to serve between one and three years — it ended up becoming much lower. Black folks went to jail a lot less than they would have before, but it was a mistake,” he said.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Biden supported his record on the crime bill, denying allegations from left-wing critics that it contributed to mass incarceration. In an interview with The Breakfast Club over the summer, he said failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was wrong for her and her husband’s involvement in the bill.
“She was wrong. What happened was — that wasn’t the crime bill, it was the drug legislation. It was their institution of mandatory minimums, which I opposed,” Biden said. In the same interview, he said black voters “ain’t black” if they chose to vote for President Trump over him.
At the time of the bill’s passage, a supermajority of the Congressional Black Caucus also backed the bill. However, Biden has expressed regret for certain components of the bill. In January 2019, Biden said stronger sentences for crack cocaine possession required by the bill were a “mistake.”
“It was a big mistake that was made,” he said then. “We were told by the experts that ‘with crack, you can never go back.'” Biden later noted that component of the bill “trapped an entire generation.”
