Joe Biden has a poor track record on criminal justice

The argument

Proponents of this view argue that Joe Biden's record on criminal justice is long, specific and consistently punitive. In his long career as Senator, they contend, he has been a leading advocate of tough-on-crime policies. It was a feature of his early politics to push for harsher sentencing and more stringent anti-drug legislation, and the record they cite spans decades rather than a single moment. The particulars are legislative. In 1977, he pushed for mandatory minimum sentences — a mechanism that removes a judge's discretion to weigh the circumstances of a case. In 1986, he helped to draft the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which increased drug sentences and introduced the vast disparity between crack and powder cocaine minimum sentencing, a disparity that determined who received the longest sentences for chemically similar offences. A 1988 act of the same name also increased drug punishments. In 1994, Biden co-authored the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which authorised the biggest expansion of the federal death penalty and led to the construction of new prisons which contributed to the mass incarceration crisis. What proponents draw from this is a point about authorship rather than about opinion. The crises now most often named as the failures of American criminal justice — mass incarceration and the handling of drug offences — are, on this account, outcomes that these statutes were designed to produce. Despite his election pledges, they argue, Biden historically played a significant role in the mass incarceration and drug abuse crises facing the US criminal justice system. He cannot be trusted to deliver on this issue and solve the problems he helped to create.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Joe Biden has learned from the mistakes he made in the past, and is now offering a series of criminal justice reforms that will address problems created by legislation he supported. He called his historic tough-on-crime approach a "big mistake" - it is important that voters judge him on his more recent record and election pledges. For more on the reforms Biden will implement, see the argument 'Joe Biden will reform the police force and criminal justice system'. Trump also has adopted a tough-on-crime approach to criminal justice, and so Biden's poor track record on the issue does not mean Trump would be better for the US criminal justice system. For more on this, see the position 'Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be as good as each other for criminal justice'.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The legislative history is real, but the premise treats one senator as its author when these were broadly bipartisan measures passed by large majorities in a period of very different public opinion, and it says nothing about the intervening thirty years of stated position changes. [Rejecting P2] The conclusion does not follow from the premises at all: showing that one candidate has a poor record establishes nothing about the other, and the argument offers no account of the second candidate's own approach — which is the comparison the position requires.