Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin acknowledged that some Democrats may have overreached during the “tough on crime” era of the 1990s, and that many neighborhoods today continue to pay the price for harsh polices that criminalized communities and were particularly unfair to minorities.
“It was an overreaction,” Durbin said Friday in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes airing Friday. “We wanted to end the threat of crime in our neighborhoods and we overreacted.”
“Now we’re gonna be smarter in the way we do this. Yes bad people will be incarcerated and they should be. And they shouldn’t be released until we’re confident they’re going to be safe in terms of their own conduct,” Durbin added. “But we’ve overdone it and we have filled our prisons at great expense.”
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