The US crime bill that former President Bill Clinton approved while in office led to a surge in the imprisonment of black people during the 1990s and subsequent years, an African American journalist in Detroit says.
“The Clinton administration signed the ominous crime bill during the mid-1990s which was very instrumental in the incarceration and judicial supervision of hundreds of thousands of African Americans,” said Abayomi Azikiwe, editor at the Pan-African News Wire.
“Also, there was the signing of the Effective Death Penalty Act under the Clinton administration which limited the ability of death row inmates to appeal their cases,” Azikiwe said in a phone interview with Press TV on Friday.
“We have to look at the demographics of who’s actually on death row, who is actually in prisons and African Americans are disproportionally on death row as well as incarcerated in US correctional facilities throughout the country,” he added.