Even before announcing that he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden was busy apologizing. At a Martin Luther King Day speech to Al Sharpton's National Action Network, Mr. Biden said "I haven't always been right" about criminal justice and "white America has to admit there's still a systematic racism and it goes almost unnoticed by so many of us."
Not long ago Mr. Biden publicly defended his role in shaping the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which funded the hiring of more cops and encouraged more "truth in sentencing" by requiring that prisoners actually serve the majority of their sentences before becoming eligible for parole. That law, Barack Obama's vice president said in 2016, "restored American cities." Mr. Biden, who was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1994, reiterated that view in his 2017 memoir.
Mr. Biden's change of tune is predictable, given his party's hard left turn on criminal justice and many other issues. But the left's central claim--that the U.S. overincarcerates--doesn't hold up, and those pushing decarceration often understate or ignore the downsides of policies that would result in more serious criminals walking the streets.
That would have a disparate racial impact. Left-wing reform advocates claim the justice system punishes blacks disproportionately, but black communities also suffer the harshest consequences from crime. Crimes committed by released convicts would affect many more black victims than white ones. Instead of apologizing, Mr. Biden should stand by the proactive policing and tougher incarceration practices that helped lower the crime rate after it peaked in the early '90s.
I disagree with Mangual on one point. Mr. Biden should apologize for upping the ante on the crack/powder ratio from the fairly steep one proposed by the Reagan Administration to an absurd 100/1. But then he overcompensated for that error by advocating the opposite error of taking it all the way back to 1/1.
This is relatively minor in the big scheme of things, though. Mangual is on target for the rest of the article, including the fact that there was nothing racist about the crack crackdown. The Congressional Black Caucus was on board at the time.
Mr. Biden's critics seem to have forgotten the disproportionate impact that violent crime had on black families--and Mr. Biden is now trying his best to forget, too. But frustration with the scourge of crime in the '80s and '90s drove support for tough-on-crime measures in the black community as much as among white senators. Mr. Biden stood with black Americans, not against them, when he supported those measures.
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