Democrat presidential hopeful Sen. Cory Booker (NJ) took a shot at former Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday and dismissed his newly released criminal justice plan, saying he is the “architect of a failed system.”
“It’s not enough to tell us what you’re going to do for our communities, show us what you’ve done for the last 40 years,” Booker wrote in a tweet without naming Biden. “You created this system. We’ll dismantle it.”
After his remarks on Twitter, Booker released a statement which amped up his argument against Biden.
“Joe Biden had more than 40 years to get this right,” Booker stated. “The proud architect of a failed system is not the right person to fix it.”
Booker also said that Biden’s 1994 crime bill was responsible for “mass incarceration” and “inflicted immeasurable harm on black, brown and low-income communities.”
“While it’s encouraging to see Vice President Biden finally come around to supporting many of the ideas I and others have proposed, his plan falls short of the transformative change our broken criminal justice system needs,” Booker continued.
Booker added that the next president must “both heal our country from decades of unjust and racist policy and put forward a sweeping vision for how we can rise together.”
Booker concluded the statement by discussing what he believes to be necessary components to a comprehensive plan, which includes “the legalization of marijuana, an overhaul of policing practices, ambitious use of presidential clemency power to right past wrongs, and reinvestment in communities that have borne the costs of mass incarceration.”
He added, “Joe Biden’s plan doesn’t do that.”
Biden, who was once tough on crime in the 1990s as a Democrat, has changed his tune in the new plan he laid out focusing on reforming the juvenile justice system, tossing out mandatory minimum sentences, bringing an end to the death penalty, and the elimination of discrepancies in certain convictions regarding cocaine and powder.
This is not the first time Booker has lashed out at Biden for his implementation of the early 90s crime bill. Earlier this year, Booker took aim at the 1994 bill and described it as “awful,” “shameful,” and “bad.”
Booker stated: “That crime bill was shameful, what it did to black and brown communities like mine [and] low-income communities from Appalachia to rural Iowa. It was a bad bill.”
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