    
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 6966
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, April 11, 2008 - 02:47 pm: | 
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Clinton would end mandatory prison sentence for crack cocaine users
WASHINGTON -- New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, campaigning for president in a neighborhood of Philadelphia so rough the mayor said, "Osama bin Laden wouldn't last here," pitched a $4-billion-a-year anti-crime package today that would put 100,000 new police officers on the streets and help stem the tide of repeat offenders back into the country's prisons.
Claiming that her husband's administration "reduced crime to historic lows" in the 1990s, Clinton argued that "we have to get back to doing what we know works."
"I'm old-fashioned about that," she told a group at a YMCA gymnasium. "I think you should actually look for solutions to problems -- find out what works and execute. Enough with the talking, enough with the speeches, enough with the rhetoric."
Clinton said her program would include $1 billion for states that want to participate in anti-recidivism efforts through education, job training and drug rehabilitation. She also urged the end of the five-year term for crack users, who are disproportionately black, because the law punishes them more harshly than powder cocaine users, who are predominantly white.
"President Bush could have built on the successes of the 1990s," she said, but instead he "slowly but surely chipped away at all of the building blocks."
Mayor Michael Nutter, who has pledged to reduce crime in Philadelphia, where there were 392 homicides last year, introduced Clinton by saying many of his constituents were more worried "about al Gangster than al Qaeda."
full article http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-campaign12apr12,1,5742184.s tory
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