How Clinton's Mass Incarceration led to crisis in public university tuitions.

How Bill Clinton’s Mass Incarceration Policies Fed Rising Higher Education Costs and Student Debt Burdens

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Yves Smith

I seldom post a extract from another site without further commentary of my own, but this is sufficiently important that it deserves to be highlighted without me getting in the way. From Ben Jealous via Medium:

Furthermore, virtually every American between 18 and 24 is paying a price for mass incarceration.

This is because state after state has cut their higher education budget to pay for higher incarceration. As a result, public university tuition and student default rates have soared. Our youngest voters find themselves most likely to either be in prison, indentured by student loan debt or afraid to even apply to college.

President Clinton was misleading when he suggested his 1994 crime bill was only responsible for 10 percent of America’s mass incarceration crisis because that bill only applied to the federal system. Since at least the 1970s, when incarceration rates began rising in America, the states have quickly replicated federal changes in sentencing laws.

Indeed, most Black Lives Matter activists have paid a steep price for President Clinton’s policies.

However, they also understand what President Clinton has often ignored: while the percentages are higher in the black community, an equal or larger number of our white sisters and brothers have been impacted by the sky-high incarceration, poverty, and student debt default rates spurred by the very policies he touted.