IN A 1998 SPEECH, then-Sen.
Joe Biden called
100,000 juveniles who had been arrested for violent crimes in the U.S.
“predators” who “warrant exceptionally, exceptionally tough treatment.”
Biden — who spent decades championing tough-on-crime legislation that escalated
mass incarceration — made the comments, which have not previously been
reported, during an address to the National Association of Attorneys General
conference in March 1998.
“There’s about 100,000 of
them, if you want to be rhetorically extreme about it, who are the predators,”
he said. “There are 100,000 real bad apples out there, 100,000 of the kids you
read about in the front page of the newspaper every day.”
By that time, Biden had
already become a face for tough-on-crime legislation, playing a critical role
in the passage of a 1994 overhaul of the criminal justice system, the Violent
Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which devastated low-income communities
and communities of color for decades. In 1996, Biden, a longtime chair of the
Senate Judiciary Committee, also co-authored and pushed a tough-on-crime bill
that targeted juveniles. The Juvenile
Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1996 would have permitted
the jailing of repeat truants and runaways. An editorialist for The Tennessean
described the legislation as being aimed at “literally making men and women out
of children.”
In the 1998 address, he went
on to give his support for the ability to try “these 100,000 bad kids” in
the adult criminal justice system rather than a separate juvenile
system. (It’s not clear exactly where the 100,000 number came from, but in a
1997 press release, Biden said: “About 3,000 kids were arrested for murder in
1995, and a total of about 100,000 arrested for other serious, violent crimes —
clearly these are the ‘lost’ children, all are not irretrievable, but plainly
all must be subject to serious punishment.”)
“The second piece of this
legislation goes out there and says, ‘OK, we’re going to get these 100,000 bad
kids, and we’re going to try them as adults,’” he said.
“Well, that’s your judgment.
You want to try them as adults, I leave that to — we have what we call
competency hearings in our state. The court decides to try the kid as an adult.
Well, if you wanna do that, I clearly see cases where that’s warranted. But
that’s not my decision as a federal official. I shouldn’t tell you under what
circumstances you must do that.”
Several early polls show that
Biden has been losing support in key primary states, with Sen. Bernie Sanders
surpassing him as the frontrunner. The former vice president’s decline has
likely been fueled, in part, by his refusal to grapple with
his past positions.
(In the case of his record on Social
Security, he flat-out lied.)
Though Biden’s tough-on-crime
rhetoric was in line with the panic of the 1990s, his use of the term,
“predator,” even then, puts him at odds with a Democratic Party that largely
denounces the language as racist. During the 2016 Democratic primary, the Trump
campaign resurfaced Hillary Clinton’s 1996 use
of the term “superpredator” to describe children involved in gangs.
Black Lives Matter activists confronted the candidate over her use of the term
during a private fundraiser, demanding an apology. And in an essay for The
Nation, author and law professor Michelle Alexander called the comments
“racially coded rhetoric to cast black children as animals.” At a
Democratic primary debate in April 2016, Sanders was asked why he criticized
Clinton for using the word 20 years prior. “Because it was a racist term, and
everybody knew it was a racist term,” Sanders responded to
cheers.
Last May, Trump slammed Biden
for his role in passing the overhaul, tweeting that anyone associated with the
1994 crime bill will not have a chance of being elected. “Super Predator was
the term associated with the 1994 Crime Bill that Sleepy Joe Biden was so
heavily involved in passing,” Trump followed
up in a tweet. “That was a dark period in American History, but has
Sleepy Joe apologized? No!” (Trump has still not apologized for calling for the
executions of the Central Park 5, five black teenagers who were falsely accused
of rape of a female jogger in 1990.)
Biden also used the term
“predator” to justify aggressive sentencing in a 1993 speech, which CNN wrote
about in March 2019, when he warned of “predators on our streets” who
were “beyond the pale,” arguing that the justice system did not know how to
rehabilitate them. He described tens of thousands of young people as “born out
of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure,
without any conscience developing because they literally … because they
literally have not been socialized, they literally have not had an
opportunity.”
The Biden campaign did not
provide comment. But a campaign spokesperson told CNN in March that
Biden’s strong rhetoric “was in response to Republican critiques that past
efforts had been too soft on crime,” adding that he was referring specifically
to violent crimes and not “a kid stealing a candy bar.”
Even at the time, Biden’s
stance was seen as extreme. “In true bipartisan spirit, Sen. Fred Thompson,
R-Tenn., has joined Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., to sponsor what’s considered a
mild bill. Mild though it may be, it’s pretty awful,” The Tennessean wrote in
1996 about Biden’s youth crime act. “In fact, their bill doesn’t target the
most violent of juvenile offenders; the legislation seems designed solely to
make an example. Their bill would allow juvenile judges to lock up truants and
runaways for up to three days in adult jails.”
Days before President Bill
Clinton’s second inauguration, Biden
said he wanted youth crime legislation modeled after his controversial
1994 crime bill. (Sanders did vote for the 1994 bill, which enjoyed wide support
at the time, but has since expressed regret for supporting “a
terrible bill.”) The punitive legislation, which passed Congress and was
signed into law by Clinton, helped create an era of mass incarceration that
disproportionately hurt black and brown Americans.
“Ninety percent of what we’re
proposing in this major Democratic initiative could be a Republican
initiative,” Biden said at a 1997 press conference. “Our thrust here is very
straightforward: We want to continue the success on the 1994 Biden or Clinton
crime law that is now in place.”
Biden also criticized a
Republican crime bill he believed didn’t go far enough, saying in a press
release from his office that “we have some number of children who are tragic
cases — so violent that we really have no choice but to get them behind bars
and keep them there, for a long time.”
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