All of the above. Let’s be real though, Bill Clinton belongs on the list as well in terms of the amount of damage inflicted by the 1994 crime bill.
Is compromising with racists racism, though?
Sometimes, you have to compromise to get something done. By 1994, Democrats were still seen as permissive white guilt liberals who were soft on crime, they've been attached to it since the 1960s, Republicans would have ran against crime anyway. What could Clinton have done?
Is there an alternative to mass incarceration? The 2020s crime wave isn't helping the activists' message.
I don't think Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, or any of those other "White Appeasement" followers were racist because of it. Their only options were to make peace with racists on crime or literally having to wait until there was something big enough to distract the public from the fact that the public believed that Democratic Antiracism policies caused crime.
It's not really if there is an alternative to Mass Incarceration, especially when the Republican Party is planning on making us guinea pigs to their biggest social experiment in 100 years. What are you going to do when its not just hundreds of thousands of urban minority boys and young men going to jail for years at a time but also women and suburbanites? When the prison population gets high enough, how do you control so many people in your custody?
