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Chula Vista · 06-02-2016, 11:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RoxyRollah

He is winning in popularity, because he is speaking to the people about their way of life being eroded. So stop it with the yer just a republican nonsense.

I didn't refer to you as a republican. And Trump is not winning in popularity.

And as far as your sweeping statement about Clinton and the black prison population. You may want to look into the facts rather than running with only a few soundbites.

Quote:

African-Americans in particular are locked up at disproportionate rates. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 37 percent of the 1.5 million men in state and federal prisons in 2013 were black, more than twice the percentage of their share of the population.

It wasn’t always this high; before 1975, the incarceration rate hovered around 200 prisoners.

Some of the growth had to do with Clinton policies, but experts said not all.

Crime policy during the 1970s and 1980s was driven by the "War on Drugs," an initiative launched by President Richard Nixon in 1971. Nixon famously called drug abuse "public enemy No. 1," which led to tougher sentencing and more arrests.

New York passed the nation’s first mandatory minimums for drug offenses in 1973, and Washington passed the first state-level truth-in-sentencing law in 1984. By 1987, five states had adopted sentencing guidelines for judges to follow.

President Bill Clinton took office in January 1993 touting a "tough-on-crime" agenda in response to an increase in violent crime and swelling homicide numbers. High-profile killings, such as the murder of Polly Klaas, followed later that year.

Bill Clinton was instrumental in the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Authored by then-Sen. Joe Biden, the sweeping crime bill provided $10 billion to fund new prisons, $6.1 billion for crime prevention and money for 100,000 new police officers.

So did the crime bill lead to mass incarceration?

The overall inmate population of the United States has grown significantly since 1994. But the sharp upward trend actually started in the early 1980s. Prisons were adding inmates in 1990 at about the same rate they were in 1997, three years after the crime bill became law.

In addition, the bill’s new sentencing standards only directly applied to federal cases. But most of the growth since 1980 has taken place within state systems, which have added almost 1.25 million prisoners over that time.

So even though the number of people in federal prison has grown, perhaps as a result of those new standards, federal prisoners represent only a small fraction of the national prison population’s overall growth.