The creator of HBO's The Wire, former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, has come out and blamed former President Bill Clinton for the large number of young black men in America's prisons, the Daily Beast's Marlow Stern reported today.
Simon also praised Georgia, a reliably Republican, conservative state, for leading the way on criminal-justice reform.
Don't expect broadcast and cable media personalities, many of whom were huge fans of The Wire series, to take much note of the criticism of the husband of the Democratic frontrunner for president or any note, really, of his praise of Georgia Republicans for an issue of import to many minority Americans.
Here's an excerpt from Stern's August 13 interview, with Stern's questions underlined, emphases mine:
We spoke about the “crisis of conscience” on the left in America when it comes to race, but at least liberals seem engaged in this conversation. Half of this country is not engaged in the conversation. If you watched the first round of GOP debates recently, the racial unrest in America was not brought up once.
And yet, I have some optimism here. First of all, I got into a conversation with the president of the United States about it where he was vocalizing the need to reduce the prison population for the first time in any administration going back to maybe Richard Nixon. Let’s face it—this is bipartisan. The administration that did the most damage in terms of jailing Americans for nonviolent offenses is the Clinton administration. By far.
Right. Clinton even tried to apologize for that a few months back.
Belatedly. Belatedly. And after there was no political gain in it, and by the way, after we reached 2 million people in prison—a rate of incarceration that, never mind nobody in the West, nobody in totalitarian states manages that rate except maybe North Korea, and we’re not even sure about that because we just don’t have enough information. But to answer your question about not being engaged, what’s the state that has done the most to reduce mass incarceration at this moment? Georgia—a red state with a Republican governor who’s absolutely committed to ending mass incarceration. [Nathan Deal’s] closing prisons and letting nonviolent drug offenders go. It began for him as an economic issue, but right now he is the poster child for political sanity when it comes to the war on drugs and mass incarceration. Georgia is now leading the way—a red state. The fact that that has penetrated in that jurisdiction tells me that something is in the air, and that it can be fixed now.
