Hillary Clinton will push for a series of criminal justice reform plans Friday by calling for eliminating the sentencing disparity for crack and powder cocaine and ending racial profiling, according to Clinton aides.
Speaking at the Ministers Luncheon of the 16th Annual Creating Opportunity Conference and her first meeting with African Americans for Hillary at Clark Atlanta University, Clinton will lay out how her criminal justice reform agenda will focus on three areas: Policing, incarceration and reentry into society.
“Clinton will fight to ensure equal amounts of crack and powder cocaine carry equal sentences and apply this change retroactively,” a Clinton aide said ahead of Friday’s speeches.
In 2010, Congress passed The Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the difference between offenses for crack and powder cocaine from 100:1 to 18:1. Clinton will argue, as many others have, that “crack and powder cocaine are two forms of the same drug and continuing to treat them differently disproportionately hurts black Americans,” the aide said ahead of the speech.
Clinton, in an effort to reduce the federal prison population, will call for reducing the disparity between mandatory sentences of crack and powder cocaine to 1-to-1.
The 2016 candidate will also call for ending racial profiling, pledging to back legislation to ban racial profiling by federal, state, and local law enforcement officials, “by prohibiting them from relying on a person’s race when conducting routine or spontaneous investigatory activities.”
Clinton will argue that racial profiling is “generally ineffective” as a policing tool and “demeans large segments of our communities and subjects them to unwarranted scrutiny.”
Since kicking off her campaign earlier this year, Clinton has pitched different aspects of criminal justice reform. Her first speech as a candidate was on addressing police brutality with body cameras and in July, Clinton told a largely black audience in South Carolina that it is time for the United States to confront “systemic racism.”
“What is so really troubling is that if you compare statistics between white men and African American men, if they are stopped, if they are arrested, if they are charged, if they are convicted, if they are sentenced, there are clear undeniable racial disparities,” Clinton said in July. “I think we have to admit this. We shouldn’t try to gloss it over or it would go away.”
Clinton will also take her criminal justice plan to South Carolina on Friday night when she speak the Charleston NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet. On Saturday, the Democratic front-runner will speak at a Grassroots Organizing Meeting with Charleston Mayor Joe Riley.
In the presidential nominating process, South Carolina is the first test of African American organizing prowess. Nearly 30% of the state is black, compared to 3% of Iowa and just over 1% of New Hampshire.
In 2008, 56% of eligible African American voters turned out to vote in the Democratic primary. The 2016 Clinton campaign’s goal: Grow that number.
“The base voters in our state in the Democratic Presidential primary are African Americans,” Clay Middleton, Clinton’s South Carolina state director, said in an interview with CNN. “In order to win the nomination, we need to make sure that all African Americans come out and vote.”
So to do that the state operation has, in their words, made sure that every event they do has African American outreach naturally integrated into it. To date, that campaign has done 1,100 community events, phone banks, canvasses., including phone banks at the states historically black colleges.
“Our goal is to organize in all 46 counties and be very strategic in who we target,” Middleton said.
‘Ban the Box’
While in Atlanta, Clinton will also back a plan to “ban the box,” a push that would “prevent the federal government as well as contractors from asking about criminal history at the initial application stage,” an aide said Friday.
Clinton has been asked about the issue previously, most notably at events focused on drug abuse, where former users have asked about how they can get a job with their long record of drug charges.
She will argue that barring federal employers and contractors to from asking about criminal backgrounds will allow formerly incarcerated individuals to “have a chance to compete for jobs on a fair basis.”
Clinton’s plan will have some exceptions, her aide said, but it would require federal employers and contractors who do need to do background checks to do so later in the process, “once individuals have had an opportunity to demonstrate their qualifications.”