Former President Bill Clinton criticized his own crime bill and defended moves by his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to move away from those policies because they resulted in too people imprisoned.
"The problem is the way it was written and implemented is we cast too wide a net, and we had too many people in prison," Clinton told CNN Wednesday.
"And we wound up ... putting so many people in prison that there wasn't enough money left to educate them, train them for new jobs and increase the chances when they came out so they could live productive lives," the former president said.
Hillary Clinton said last week while Baltimore was still reeling from violent protests that there needed to be reforms in the criminal justice system, saying that "there is something wrong when a third of all black men face the prospect of prison during their lifetimes."
She said it was time for lawmakers in Washington to work on bringing an "end to the era of mass incarceration."
The former secretary of state went on to praise the efforts by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul to take on this issue, but Paul said that former President Clinton's policies were partially to blame for some of the problems facing the criminal justice system today.
Bill Clinton signed the omnibus crime bill into law in 1994, which included the "three strikes" rule, which meant criminals who were convicted of a violent felony with two or more other convictions, even drug crimes, were given mandatory life sentences. The measure also provided funding for more police officers.
The former president put some of the blame for the measure on Republicans, who controlled Congress at the time.
"I wanted to pass a bill and so I did go along with it," Bill Clinton said, adding that he agrees with his wife's proposals.
"I mean, going from conservative Republicans to liberal Democrats and the people in between saying there's too many people in jail and we're not doing enough to rehabilitate the ones you could rehabilitate," he said.
"We're wasting too much money locking people up who don't need to be there," the former president said.
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