Biden on the 1994 Crime Bill
Former Vice President Joe Biden defended his support decades ago for a controversial crime bill, saying in a speech in South Carolina, “There’s another part of my long record that’s being grossly misrepresented: the 1994 crime bill.”
We’ll go through Biden’s points about what was in the bill and what he supported or opposed.
Biden spoke about the bill in a speech in Sumter on July 6 in which he addressed his earlier remarks a few weeks ago about working with “some civility” in the 1970s with two segregationist southern Democrats to get “things done” even though “we didn’t agree on much of anything.” Biden, who is leading the national polls for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, apologized in his Sumter speech, saying, “I’m sorry for any of the pain or misconception” his remarks “may have caused anybody.”
He also made extensive remarks about the 1994 crime bill, which Biden, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, largely wrote and shepherded through the legislative process. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 received bipartisan support at the time but has been criticized for some of its provisions, such as mandatory minimum sentencing, and its impact on mass incarceration. (When we looked at claims in 2016 from both sides on the law’s role in mass incarceration, we found the trend of increasing imprisonment began well before 1994, but experts told us the 1994 law exacerbated the issue.)
The legislation was aimed at addressing rising crime in the country and contained a host of policing and crime prevention provisions — including “three-strikes” mandatory life sentences for repeat violent offenders, funding for community policing and prisons, an assault weapons ban and the Violence Against Women Act. It authorized $30.2 billion, according to a Congressional Research Service on federal crime measures. It increased federal crimes subject to the death penalty and enabled juveniles to be tried as adults for violent and firearm-involved federal crimes.
