In the 1980s, Biden worked with his “old buddy,” arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond, to pass several bills that fundamentally reshaped the American criminal justice system in the direction of more incarceration.
They, along with Ted Kennedy, had worked on earlier (unsuccessful) proposals that raised maximum penalties, removed a directive requiring the US Sentencing Commission to take into account prison capacity, and created the cabinet-level “drug czar” position. In 1984, they passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which, among other things, abolished parole, imposed a less generous cap on “good time” sentence reductions, and allowed the Sentencing Commission to issue more punitive guidelines.
Biden would later brag in the Senate that it was under his and Thurmond’s leadership that Congress passed a law sending anyone caught with a rock of cocaine the size of a quarter to jail for a minimum of five years. In the same speech Biden went on to take credit for a legislative change allowing the government to effectively rob anyone caught dealing drugs, through the policy of civil asset forfeiture, and demanded to know why the Bush administration hadn’t sentenced more drug dealers to life in prison or death once Congress had given him that power.
Unlike Biden’s record on civil rights activism, these weren’t empty words: he had indeed voted for both the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and its 1988 iteration, which together created a regime of harsh mandatory minimums for drug possession, including the “quarter” example Biden would later brag about, as well as the notoriously racist hundred-to-one sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. The latter also imposed the death penalty for drug-related murders and barred both drug dealers and users from getting government benefits, an amendment Biden specifically voted for.
Not long before Bush’s landmark speech on the drug war, Biden released his own drug strategy report, recommending that the government focus on “the hard-core addict” because they were “responsible for most of the drug-related crime and violence.” “Every hardcore addict must be faced with one of two stark choices: get into treatment or go to jail and get treatment in jail,” he wrote.
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