POLITICS

Hillary Clinton Addresses Baltimore, Race and Justice in Impassioned Speech

By  and 
PLAY VIDEO|0:47

Clinton on Effects of Mass Incarceration

Clinton on Effects of Mass Incarceration

On Wednesday, Hillary Rodham Clinton, a 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, called for an end to mass incarceration, saying it does little to reduce crime.
 By Reuters on  April 29, 2015.Photo by Michael Appleton for The New York Times.
Hillary Rodham Clinton had not planned to make the first major policy speech of her presidential campaign an impassioned plea to mend the nation’s racial fissures and overhaul an “out-of-balance” criminal justice system.
But by Tuesday, as the nation confronted shocking scenes of Baltimore’s smoke-filled streets, Mrs. Clinton knew that the death of Freddie Gray from injuries he suffered while in police custody would lead her to make race, poverty and incarceration of men from poor, black communities central to her early campaign.
“There is something profoundly wrong when African-American men are still far more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes and sentenced to longer prison terms than are meted out to their white counterparts,” Mrs. Clinton said in a forceful address Wednesday at Columbia University.
She said Mr. Gray’s death, the subsequent protests and the assault on innocent police officers in Baltimore “tear at your soul.”
The remarks marked the first time Mrs. Clinton has delivered a substantive policy address in a fledgling presidential race that had to now been defined by candidates’ upbeat announcements and vague promises.
Demonstrators in Baltimore on Tuesday. Presidential candidates weighed in on the rioting and unrest there. Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 
For those seeking the White House, the conflagration in Baltimore exposed a complicated truth: The racial comity that the election of Barack Obama seemed to promise has not materialized, forcing them to grapple with a red-hot, deeply unresolved dynamic that strays far from their carefully crafted messages and favored themes.
“I don’t think any of the candidates want or expect the summer of 2015 to be like the summer of 1968,” when race riots hit major American cities, said Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican political strategist who is not aligned with any campaign.
A number of people “crafted this tacit bargain in their heads,” he said, speaking of Mr. Obama’s election. “This is going to be the end of the ugly parts of racial division in American.”
For Mrs. Clinton, the topic carries particular weight.
Many criminal justice experts viewed her plea “to end the era of mass incarceration” as repudiation of the policies of policing and prison building associated with her husband’s administration and the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. That law created tougher penalties for drug offenders and devoted $30.2 billion to put more police officers on the street and build new prisons.
“When we talk about one and a half million missing African-American men, we’re talking about missing husbands, missing fathers, missing brothers,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Who Is Running for President (and Who’s Not)? 

Without naming Mrs. Clinton, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is expected to declare his candidacy for the Democratic nomination, bemoaned the overly punitive legislation of the Clinton era. “There’s a lot of rethinking of that type of legislation,” he said in an interview. “If for no other reason just financially it makes more sense to provide jobs and education than building jails.” While elected officials had embraced the tough-on-crime approach decades before Mr. Clinton took office, the adult prison population after his signing of the law nearly doubled from the early 1990s to about 2.2 million prisoners today.
“What I read in Clinton’s speech is a repudiation of the notion that more prisons and more punishment equals more safety,” said Nicholas Turner, president and director of the Vera Institute of Justice.
In her last presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton echoed the approach of the Bill Clinton years with a call to expand police forces to help cities halve the homicide rate. But she largely ceded issues of racial equality to Mr. Obama, who inspired Democrats with his seminal speech on race relations after divisive remarks by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.
But on Wednesday Mrs. Clinton said it was “a time for honesty about race and justice in America,” and she displayed a personal connection to the issue.
Mrs. Clinton had long planned to deliver remarks about urban policy and criminal justice at a forum hosted by former Mayor David N. Dinkins. But only after the situation in Baltimore flared did she focus those remarks on current events, according to a campaign aide.
In her remarks, Mrs. Clinton echoed her broader campaign theme of tackling income inequality. She said the protests in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., were indelibly linked to an economy that disproportionately favors the wealthy and she delivered a populist lament that prosperity should be measured by strengthening families and communities and not Wall Street’s measure of “the size of the bonuses handed out in downtown office buildings.”
Many of the 2016 contenders seemed either caught off guard or uncertain of how, or even whether, to respond to the situation in Baltimore. With few exceptions, the candidates first grappled with the city’s turmoil from the safe distance of written statements released by aides or brief postings on social media.
Reactions ranged from the personal to the doctrinaire, from compassionate to flippant. Former Gov. Martin O’Malley rushed back on Tuesday from paid speechmaking in Ireland to the West Baltimore neighborhood he once oversaw as mayor, seeming at once heartbroken and eager to project calm.
Amid drum circles and hovering helicopters, Mr. O’Malley spoke with city residents — some admiring, others not — at an intersection cater-corner to the burned-out CVS Pharmacy. “I think there’s a lot of good people in our city,” he said. “The longer arc of Baltimore, the longer arc of our history, is black and white people coming together to make a better life for themselves.”
Jeb Bush on Tuesday planted a foot in two angry worlds, demanding justice for Freddie Gray and the rule of law in riot-battered Baltimore.
“There has to be a commitment to the rule of law,” he said of the rioters, but he insisted on an investigation into Mr. Gray’s death “as quickly as possible so that people know that the system works for them.
Ben Carson, a former neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital seeking the Republican nomination, evoked his own time as a Baltimore resident, and denounced “irresponsible individuals” and “uncontrolled agitators.”
And Rand Paul sounded oddly off-key, chuckling about the terror he has felt while traveling by train through Baltimore. “I’m glad it didn’t stop,” he said.
Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a likely Republican candidate, remained in the shelter of his cautious Twitter stream. “Our prayers for restoration of peace in Baltimore,” he posted on Twitter, without elaboration.