Hillary Clinton has a pathetic record on race-related issues [View all]

[gobears10]

Last edited Thu Jul 23, 2015, 04:02 AM - Edit history (1)

HRC on the 1994 Crime Bill:

"We need more police, we need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders. The three strikes and you’re out for violent offenders has to be part of the plan. We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets."

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsullum/2015/04/30/why-hillary-clinton-lacks-credibility-on-criminal-justice-reform/

HRC on Bill Clinton's 1996 Welfare Reform:

Many of the advocates who knew Mrs. Clinton as a champion for the poor and working-class women felt betrayed in 1996 when, as first lady, she supported Mr. Clinton’s overhaul of the welfare system, which gave states more power to remove people from welfare rolls and pledged to cut federal spending on assistance for the poor by nearly $55 billion over six years...

Mrs. Clinton expressed no misgivings about the 1996 legislation, saying that it was a needed — and enormously successful — first step toward making poor families self-sufficient.

“Welfare should have been a temporary way station for people who needed immediate assistance,” she said. “It should not be considered an anti-poverty program. It simply did not work.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/us/politics/11welfare.html?pagewanted=print

However, welfare reform was a resounding failure, especially when mixed with Bill Clinton's War on Drugs. It marginalized single mothers of color who are low-income. Hillary Clinton was defending welfare reform in her 2008 run for POTUS.

Committing a drug crime was supposed to permanently ban a person from food stamps and welfare benefits under a little-discussed provision of the Clinton-Gingrich reforms...

The War on Drugs and the War on Poverty aren’t easily mixed. Making it harder to eat and pay rent won’t help someone busted for pot possession or small-time cocaine sales to recover economically and socially from years in prison. The bans ensure that every discriminatory effect of the drug war gets amplified economically even after the criminal justice system is done with a person. Because women are the primary recipients of both assistance programs, and women of color are more likely to get caught up in the racial disparities of the criminal justice system, the bans have ended up disproportionately affecting women of color and their children — and doing next to nothing to combat either drugs or poverty.

Source: http://sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/cc_A%20Lifetime%20of%20Punishment.pdf

HRC on The War on Drugs:
Hillary Clinton, while a U.S. Senator, opposed addressing the discrepancy in sentencing for using power cocaine vs crack cocaine, one fueling racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

Mrs. Clinton opposed a moderate proposal by the United States Sentencing Commission that would have retroactively reduced the draconian penalties for possession of crack cocaine — a proposal supported by Mr. Obama, and by liberal as well as conservative judges.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/opinion/01rosen.html

HRC's "Tough-On-Crime" Policies Through The Years:

1996: In her book, “It Takes a Village,” Clinton again endorses the crime bill, and argues in favor of “zero-tolerance” policies for kids who break the rules at school.

2000: Clinton suggests that the death penalty has her “unenthusiastic support."

(Let's not forget than in application, the death penalty has affected people of color disproportionately.)

2007: Clinton votes “Yes” to reinstate her husband’s COPS initiative, a program for putting hundreds of thousands more police officers on the streets, to full $1.15 billion funding. She also co-sponsors the COPS Improvement Act, which would direct grant money toward the hiring of more anti-terror, anti-gang, and school-based police officers.

2007-2008: Clinton was for medical research into the benefits of marijuana, but not decriminalization.

2008: Clinton's campaign team plays the “soft on crime” card against Barack Obama. Her aides suggest to ABC News that candidate Obama's positions on criminal justice – including his opposition to mandatory-minimum sentences – are too liberal and out-of-touch with mainstream views.

2008: Hillary Clinton's campaign's relied on code words and innuendo seemingly designed to frame Barack Obama's race as problematic, saying Obama was characterized by the Clinton campaign and its prominent supporters as anti-white due to his association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, as able to attract only black votes, as anti-patriotic, a drug user, possibly a drug seller, and married to an angry, ungrateful black woman. Clinton's campaign engages in "dog-whistle politics" to appeal to subtle and blatant anti-black racism among working class whites.

2014: Later in the year, Clinton labeled marijuana a "gateway drug" where there "can't be a total absence of law enforcement."

2015: Clinton says "All Lives Matter" instead of "Black Lives Matter" at a historical black church. She hasn't apologized or publicly expressed her regret for her views.

Source: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/05/01/a-more-or-less-definitive-guide-to-hillary-clinton-s-record-on-law-and-order