Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said during Thursday’s televised town hall that his support for the 1994 crime bill was a mistake, although he insisted the main problem was with “what states did locally” under the framework and defended some parts of the initiative as actually leading to lower incarceration rates for African Americans.
An audience member asked Biden during the ABC Town Hall event at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, “What’s your view on the crime bill that you wrote in 1994, which showed prejudice against minorities?” referring to the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which has often been blamed for expanding tough-on-crime policies that disproportionately criminalized black Americans.
