Every presidential candidate runs on some combination of two things: what they’ve already done, and what they plan to do next. More experienced candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders can lean on both equally, while relative newcomers like Beto O’Rourke or Pete Buttigieg tend to focus on the latter. The calculus for Joe Biden is a little different.

The former vice president entered American politics more than four decades ago, and his experience comes at a cost. Since announcing his presidential bid last week, he’s spent most of his time trying to explain, rationalize, or express regret over key moments in his career. So far, he’s avoided rolling out any new policies or initiatives. That raises an obvious question for voters: What exactly is he running on?

No part of Biden’s record has received more scrutiny than the decades he spent championing tough-on-crime legislation while serving in the Senate. He wasn’t alone in those efforts, of course. Democratic and Republican policymakers responded to spiking crime rates in the 1980s with more punitive penalties for drug use and lengthier sentences for prisoners. Seeking to blunt GOP accusations that the Democrats were “soft on crime,” Biden and other top Democrats jockeyed to outdo them. “We finally, finally got it so that it was not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue,” Biden told reporters in 1989.

Biden’s crime proposals were often less severe than those drafted by Republicans at the time. His 1991 anti-crime legislative package, for example, included measures that would bar the federal death penalty for juvenile defendants, people with intellectual disabilities, and cases where “racial patterns” called its legitimacy into question. In response, a spokesman for President George H. W. Bush quipped to The New York Times that those restrictions “would be like having no death penalty at all.”

The Democrats were still plenty harsh, though. Biden played a key role in the passage of the 1994 crime bill, which threw the full weight of Congress behind mass incarceration. The law expanded mandatory minimum sentences, provided billions of dollars in funding for new prisons, and opened federal spigots for local police departments to hire thousands of new officers. Most of the law built on earlier measures Biden championed throughout the 1980s. “For a generation,” Jamelle Bouie wrote for Slate in 2015, “Biden was at the front of a national push for tough drug laws and police militarization.”