Joe Biden Was a Leader in Building Up the Carceral State
These days, Joe Biden likes to tout his civil rights credentials. But he was central to the racist drive to lock people up and throw the key.
Joe Biden on February 26, 2020. (Logan Cyrus / Getty Images)
Black lives really do matter. But the problem is institutional racism in America. That’s the overarching problem that exists.
— Joe Biden, 2016.
It was Labor Day weekend in 1980 when a young motorist found himself being tailed by an irate Joe Biden.
The young man had been speeding down an abandoned road when Biden, attending a nearby birthday party at his sister’s house, spotted him. Alarmed at the driver’s recklessness when his and the other parents’ kids were playing outside — and no doubt triggered by the trauma of the crash that had killed his first wife and baby daughter — Biden jumped into his car and chased him for more than half a mile, finally catching him across state lines in Pennsylvania.
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