“That percentage of it, we were wrong about”.
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“And we wound up… putting so many people in prison that there wasn’t enough money left to educate them, train them for new jobs and increase the chances when they came out so they could live productive lives”, Clinton said.
“President Clinton comes to the NAACP’s 106th annual convention as not merely a humanitarian or a former president but as a friend”, NAACP President and CEO Cornell Brooks said in a statement. By the end of the Clinton presidency, the number of people in America’s prisons rose by almost 60%, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. He told attendees he was wrong to sign a law that resulted in mass incarcerations of nonviolent drug offenders, a day after President Obama called for changes to those laws.
He said the “good news” was that the tough raft of measures in the bill had helped secure “the biggest drop in crime history”.
In an interview with CNN earlier this year, the former President said the problem is the 1994 law “cast too wide a net and we had too many people in prison”.
Obama and Hillary Clinton have spoken out against “mass incarceration”. “As the country is faced with challenges, we look forward to hearing the former President lend his perspective on some of the most important civil rights challenges of our time…”
At the time, Clinton held an open-air event attended by hundreds of congressmen and officials to usher in the new bill, which he promised would “restore the line between right and wrong”. “The bad news is we had a lot people who were locked up, who were minor actors, for way too long”.
Clinton’s wife, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, has made crime reform one of the central issues of her campaign. “Our prisons and our jails are now our mental health institutions”.
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It is the latest policy that Clinton has recanted for in recent years, previously regretting his signature on the Defense of Marriage Act and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that banned gay and lesbians from serving openly in the military.
