Hillary Clinton declared Wednesday in New York that there’s “something wrong” with criminal justice in America.

But a lot of what Clinton finds wrong can be traced to her husband’s presidency.


Bill Clinton imposed harsher sentencing guidelines, cut education funding for prisoners, and expanded the flow of military equipment to local police in the 1990s, when violent crime was surging and tough policies played well in the political center. With Baltimore in flames and bipartisan concern about mass incarceration rising, both Clintons are now calling for reform.

“It’s time to end the era of mass incarceration,” said the former secretary of state in Wednesday’s speech at Columbia University. What she didn’t say: She lobbied liberal lawmakers to support her husband’s 1994 crime bill, which included $9.7 billion in prison funding and tougher sentencing provisions.

Clinton decried the decades-long growth of American prison populations, though it continued unabated during her husband’s administration and beyond. The number of prisoners grew nearly 60 percent between the end of 1992 and the end of 2000, the duration of Bill Clinton’s presidency, according to figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Clinton also took aim at the militarization of police forces. “We can start by making sure that federal funds for state and local law enforcement are used to bolster best practices, rather than to buy weapons of war that have no place on our streets,” she said Wednesday.

Left unsaid: A program signed into law by her husband increased the flow of those weapons from the Pentagon to local police departments. The 1997 National Defense Authorization Act allowed the Department of Defense to donate excess supplies to local law enforcement agencies for any purpose, expanding an older program that was limited to aiding anti-narcotics operations. Under the program inaugurated by the Clinton administration, the Pentagon has transferred more than $5.4 billion worth of supplies, including weapons and vehicles, to local police, according to the Defense Logistics Agency.

These tough-on-crime policies, say advocates of reform, have set the stage for the unrest enveloping Baltimore and other American cities in response to police violence against black men.

“I think where we are today partly can be attributed to what went on in the ’90s,” said Marc Schindler, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute. “That includes who was in the White House, who was in Congress, who was in statehouses across the country.”

In Clinton’s speech, she also called for police to wear body cameras as a matter of routine and lamented the recent spate of highly publicized deaths of young black men at the hands of police. Clinton had been scheduled to speak at Columbia University’s annual David N. Dinkins Leadership and Public Policy Forum since last year. A campaign source said that as the details of her speech came into focus this week, she felt compelled to weigh in on the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died of severe injuries sustained in police custody in Baltimore, setting off riots there. But, said the source, Clinton had always planned to address criminal and social justice.

Harvard law professor and civil libertarian Alan Dershowitz said he’s long seen daylight between the Clintons on such issues. “I agree with Hillary Clinton’s positions on criminal justice and fundamentally disagree with President Clinton’s, and I did back then,” he said. “In general, I see Hillary Clinton as centrist-left on criminal justice issues, and I saw Bill Clinton as center-right on criminal justice.”

One issue on which Dershowitz withholds support from Hillary Clinton is the death penalty. “We haven’t yet heard clearly her views,” he said. The 1994 crime bill she lobbied for expanded the number of federal crimes eligible for the death penalty. In 2000, she said the death penalty had her “unenthusiastic support,” and her campaign recently declined to comment to POLITICO on her current stance.

Defenders say that both Bill Clinton’s policies in the 1990s and Hillary Clinton’s recent rhetoric are appropriate for their time. As violent crime has plummeted, awareness of a mass incarceration crisis has risen and instances of death-by-cop have caught the world’s attention, they say, the policy consensus has shifted.

“Spoiler Alert:” tweeted Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson on Wednesday afternoon, “HRC policy on internet might also be different than WJC policy in 1994. Not b/c he was wrong but b/c times change.”

“There’s been a collective rethinking of our criminal justice system,” said Inimai Chettiar, director of the justice program at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, who added that she didn’t find Clinton’s recent statements inconsistent with her husband’s record. “It’s not her disagreeing with his policies — there’s been a seismic shift across the board. Giving states billions to build prisons wasn’t such a good idea, but they did what they thought they needed to do at that time.”

Bill Clinton penned the foreword of a book on criminal justice reform released this week by the Brennan Center, and Hillary Clinton authored a chapter of the book, which made many of the same points as Wednesday’s speech.

In the not-quite-mea culpa foreword, the former president concedes many of the shortcomings of the criminal justice policy he enacted in the 1990s: “We acted to address a genuine national crisis. But much has changed since then. It’s time to take a clear-eyed look at what worked, what didn’t, and what produced unintended, long-lasting consequences. So many of these laws worked well, especially those that put more police on the streets. But too many laws were overly broad instead of appropriately tailored.”

In addition to expanding the death penalty, imposing harsher sentences, and funding more jails, then-President Clinton’s 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act eliminated Pell grants for higher education for prisoners. At the time, the measures helped Clinton position himself as a Democrat with law-and-order credibility.

Now, the former president takes a different line. “If we shorten prison terms, could we take those savings and, for example, restore the prison education programs that practically eliminate recidivism? How can we reduce the number of prisoners while still keeping down crime?”