Bill Clinton Says He Made Prison Problems Worse

Bill Clinton‘s days in politics may be over, but the former president is making headlines by admitting that a crime law he championed in the 1990s has actually made things worse for U.S. prisons.

Clinton made his remarks during an NAACP convention in Philadelphia. CNN reports that Clinton said he wanted to admit the failure of the law.

During the speech, Clinton said a decade of “roaring” crime had resulted in expanding gang violence and the deaths of innocent people caught in the crossfire. To combat the problem, Congress approved an omnibus crime bill that Clinton signed into law in 1994.

“In that bill, there were longer sentences. And most of these people are in prison under state law, but the federal law set a trend,” Clinton said. “And that was overdone. We were wrong about that. That percentage of it, we were wrong about.”

Politico reports that Clinton said there were some positives that came from the law. Clinton noted increases in the number of police on patrol and additional programs for young people.

“We put 100,000 more police on the streets so they could be tighter tied to the community, and we passed the Brady Bill and the Assault Weapons Ban which had an ammunition on the clip, as I remember, of about 10 bullets,” Clinton said. “And we passed funds to give people something to say yes to in the after-school hours not just to say no to.”

Clinton said the bill did reduce crime, but sentenced too many people who were only “minor actors” to prison terms that were too long.

According to CNN, Clinton’s comments come at a time when power players within the Democratic Party are making criminal justice reform a talking point. Both President Barrack Obama and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton have spoken about the issue recently.

At the same convention where Clinton spoke, President Obama appeared the day before and outlined his own plan to make changes to the system that has resulted in the mass incarceration of so many Americans.

“Mass incarceration makes our country worse off and we need to do something about it,” Obama said.

Clinton’s wife, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, has made crime reform one of the central issues of her campaign.

“Keeping them behind bars does little to reduce crime, but it does a lot to tear apart families,” Hillary Clinton said during a campaign stop in New York earlier this year.

CNN also notes that this week wasn’t the first time Bill Clinton has expressed regret about the 1994 crime bill. In an interview with the network earlier this year, Clinton went on record as saying the bill “cast too wide a net” when determining who should be incarcerated.

“And we wound up… putting so many people in prison that there wasn’t enough money left to educate them, train them for new jobs and increase the chances when they came out so they could live productive lives,” Clinton said.

[Photo by Neilson Barnard / Getty Images]