Joe Biden will reform the police force and the criminal justice system

The argument

Biden has announced a range of criminal justice reforms that will break the cycle of crime and incarceration, shifting the emphasis towards rehabilitation and prevention. He has called for an end to the death penalty, and wants to scale back solitary confinement practices. Biden’s campaign site also announces that “no one should be incarcerated for drug use alone” and that drug courts and treatments should be used instead. Biden also wants to end cash bail, which he calls the “modern-day debtors prison”, since it injects discrimination into the system, punishing low-income individuals. He will also introduce measures to help former prisoners to find work, extending the ‘ban the box’ initiative. Biden will also end mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent crimes by introducing a $20bn grant scheme which will also combat child abuse and promote education. On policing, Biden has rejected calls to defund the police, and has instead proposed a $300m investment in the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) programme to improve police training and achieve racial diversity in the force. He also wants to expand mental health and social services to drive crime prevention, particularly in schools, and will create a new commission to review police behaviour and punish wrongdoing, which will be expanded to cover chokeholds. These reforms will transform the US criminal justice system and will break cycles of re-offence and incarceration. Taking a more compassionate approach to criminal justice, Biden will reduce inmate numbers and will help individuals return to mainstream society.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Whilst Biden has pledged to introduce a range of reforms to the criminal justice system, he has a poor record on this issue. In the past, he pushed for harsher sentencing and anti-drug laws that created many of the problems his current policy proposals seek to solve. For more information on this, see the argument 'Joe Biden has a poor track record on criminal justice'. Biden plans to introduce progressive reforms to the criminal justice system, but his past actions suggest that he cannot be trusted to implement them. Biden's call to reduce punishments for some crimes also suggests he is soft on crime, and is not the candidate of law and order. To combat criminality, harsh punishments should remain as a deterrent - Trump is the candidate who will reduce crime. For more on this issue, see 'Donald Trump will restore law and order'. Biden's proposed reforms do not go far enough. A more radical overhaul of the police is needed to prevent crime: they should have their weapons and most aggressive resources removed, with funds being diverted to community services. The militaristic methods used by the US police force cannot be remedied by moderate reforms, the US police force should have funds withdrawn and communities should have more say on how crime should be prevented.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A list of announced reforms is a statement of intent rather than a result. Almost every item named requires Congress or the states — cash bail, mandatory minimums and most sentencing law sit outside a president's unilateral reach — so the premise establishes what was proposed, not what would follow. It also passes over the record the counter raises: the same figure was a principal author of the 1994 crime bill and of earlier drug-sentencing legislation that produced several of the problems these proposals address. [Rejecting P2] The policing proposals are the weakest part of the list for the purpose given them. Better training, greater diversity and a misconduct commission are federal levers aimed at some 18,000 largely locally controlled departments, and the premise gives no account of how they reach them. Rejecting defunding is a positioning claim rather than a policy, offered without reference to the argument on the other side of it. [Rejecting C] The conclusion is comparative and only one candidate is examined. That a programme exists does not establish that it is better than the alternative, which would require both records and both platforms set against each other — and, since the premises are wholly prospective, some account of what could actually be delivered.