Search Results: bringing up the past

Biden has talked about how the Criminal justice system has adversely impacted Black communities in the US but many political pundits brought up how he largely wrote up the 1994 Crime Bill that has resulted in mass incarceration. However, this ignores the context: violent crime rates at the time were increasing and no one new why. Since then violent crime rates were going down but continuation of such policies and introduction of new ones (which have been mostly supported by the GOP) have kept the incarceration rate high. So Biden supported harsher sentences when crime rate was going up while current GOP members are pushing for being harder on crime when violent crime has been going down.

As for "Libertarians", well for the most part they never did support the "tough on crime" bills BUT it wasn't until 2013 that we figured out why violent crime rates had been increasing from the 1960s to mid 1990s and then started to decline. As the automobile industry boomed after WWII, more car fumes filled the city air and gasoline at that time used triethyl lead. As more and more people in the city owned cars, the more and more lead there would have been until in 1973, the EPA announced the phasing out of leaded gasoline and then the average lead levels in the blood of the population has declined since. When people are exposed to lead as a toddler, it increases to tendency to engage in violent behavior as an adult (hence a 23 year lag between cause and effect). And given the Libertarian position on regulations, they would have opposed any measure to enforce a ban on leaded gasoline so if it were up to then, it would have been continued to have been used and violent crime would have continued to increase past the early to mid 90s.