One of his Senate staffers at the time recalls him remarking, “Whenever people hear the words ‘drugs’ and ‘crime,’ I want them to think ‘Joe Biden.’” Insisting on anonymity, this former staffer recollected how Biden’s team “had to think up excuses for new hearings on drugs and crime every week — any connection, no matter how remote. He wanted cops at every public meeting — you’d have thought he was running for chief of police.”
“We do everything but hang people for jaywalking.”, he boasted. Biden was labeled the bill’s “architect” and “shepherded [the bill] to passage”, despite strong opposition from the ACLU, NAACP, and other civil rights groups.
In the National Drug Control Strategy Act, Biden’s intent to militarize the drug war was even more overt. It included “military-style boot camp prisons” for people convicted of drug-related crimes. It authorized “appropriations under the Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act” to train military law enforcement. It even “provided resources” for television programs and movies to be used as anti-drug propaganda. Again, this bill was unsuccessful.
It is hard to name an infamously unjust feature of America’s criminal-justice system that Joe Biden didn’t help to bring about. Mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, civil asset forfeiture, and extensive use of the death penalty — the Delaware senator was involved in establishing them all.
In 1996, Biden voted for Bob Dole’s Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, reducing the rates of state court reversals of death penalty decisions by 40%.
In 1981, Biden voted for the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Officials Act, which did everything its name implied, contributing to the increasing militarization of the police. And that was far from Biden’s only effort to militarize the police:
When it wasn’t drugs, Biden used terrorism as a justification to militarize law enforcement. He inserted a provision into the Patriot Act that allowed state and local departments to apply to get equipment needed to combat terrorism. This was beside the extraordinary surveillance powers the law granted to police, which they now casually use for drug and immigration cases.
When Bush floated a review of the centuries-old law against the domestic use of the military in 2002 — about the same time he had considered sending troops into suburban Buffalo to arrest a group of suspected terrorists — Biden supported it, saying: “I think it is time to revisit it.”
https://medium.com/@moon_bat/the-real-joe-biden-7e9023009dee