Joe Biden unveils criminal justice reform plan would alter crime policies he wrote as senator

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden sought Tuesday to ease concerns about his past decision-making on criminal justice, rolling out a plan to move the system away from the “tough on crime” policies that he helped to enshrine into law as a member of the Senate.

Mr. Biden’s plan seeks to unwind parts of the Crime Bill that he helped usher through Congress in 1994 and that activists blame for contributing to the nation’s high mass incarceration rates and for ravaging minority communities.

“Today, too many people are incarcerated in the United States — and too many of them are black and brown,” the Biden campaign said. “To build safe and healthy communities, we need to rethink who we’re sending to jail, how we treat those in jail, and how we help them get the health care, education, jobs, and housing they need to successfully rejoin society after they serve their time.”

Mr. Biden is backing legislation to limit federal mandatory minimum sentences to the highest-level drug offenders and to reduce prison sentences through good behavior.

His plan creates a $20 billion grant program that would give incentives to states to craft their own policies to reduce incarceration rates, including by eliminating mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent crimes. It also calls for ending the disparity in sentencing for convictions tied to crack cocaine versus powder cocaine, which Mr. Biden now says was a mistake.

Mr. Biden supports decriminalizing the use of marijuana, expunging prior marijuana-related convictions, and ending “all incarceration for drug use alone.” He also wants to work to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, end cash bail, and cut off the federal government’s use of private prisons.

Inimai Chettiar, policy director of the Justice Action Network, said the Biden plan has much in common with some of the other proposals that have been suggested his rivals in the 2020 presidential race and said it shows there is a general consensus among the contenders that the nation must find ways to end mass incarceration.

“For a while it sounded like Biden would be doubling down on the ’94 Crime Bill and I think we are really pleased to see that he is moving forward and putting out a way to reduce mass incarceration,” Ms. Chettier said.

“Basically what Biden is putting out is a reverse of the ’94 Crime Bill,” she said. “If you look at all the provisions that were in the ’94 Crime Bill, other than the Violence Against Women part of it, this seems like a 180 in terms of the Crime Bill versus this platform.”

Mr. Biden’s record on race has gotten a second look since Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California grilled him over his opposition to desegregation busing in the 1970s.

Mr. Biden’s poll numbers dipped after the debate, and he has been working to stop the bleeding as he prepares for the second debate next week in Detroit.

Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris and Sen. Cory A. Booker will share the stage on the second night of the back-to-back debates.

On Tuesday, Mr. Booker said Mr. Biden’s criminal justice plan was too little, too late.

“Joe Biden had more than 40 years to get this right,” Mr. Booker said in a statement. “The proud architect of a failed system is not the right person to fix it.”

“The 1994 Crime Bill accelerated mass incarceration and inflicted immeasurable harm on black, brown and low-income communities,” he said. “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.”

Mr. Biden announced his plan ahead of his appearance Wednesday at the NAACP national convention and Thursday at the National Urban League Conference in Indianapolis.

Some criminal justice and marijuana activists said his plan didn’t go far enough.

Erik Altieri, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said Mr. Biden’s push to reclassify marijuana as a Schedule II drug “fails to address the core problems related to criminalization and the current tension between state and federal laws — in fact it actually creates even more complex issues.”

“Joe Biden needs to learn that it is no longer the 1980s and that his watered-down proposed policies surrounding marijuana are wholly insufficient to address the crisis at hand,” Mr. Altieri said. “Joe Biden either lacks the courage to lead the country on ending our failed prohibition on marijuana that results in over 600,000 individuals being locked up every year or is simply ignoring sound policy on the matter.”

Sam Sinyangwe, co-founder of the group Campaign Zero, said it is important that Mr. Biden’s plan marks a change from what he has done in the past, but that he is not sure how that squares with his past rhetoric.

“I think when he’s had to defend the Crime Bill, he [has] sort of said that it was good policy, that it included a lot of good things and that he isn’t sorry about the Crime Bill and that it didn’t contribute to mass incarceration,” he said. “And yet his plan to reduce incarceration actually repeals aspects of the Crime Bill, so I don’t think you can have it both ways.”

The Biden campaign also blasted out an op-ed Tuesday in which Richard “Mouse” Smith, former president of the Delaware NAACP, and Sam Latham, former president of the Delaware AFL-CIO labor federation and the first black person to hold the position, vouched for the former Delaware senator, saying he has been a champion for civil rights.

“We Delawareans, and many African Americans around the country know who Joe is, and who he always has been,” they wrote. “Joe has been our champion, rolling up his sleeves to take on the issues facing the black community.”