Introduction America’s Prisons: A Portrait of the Vulnerable* On the horizon are tens of thousands of severely morally impoverished juvenile super-predators. They are perfectly capable of committing the most heinous acts of physical violence for the most trivial reasons . . . they will do what comes “naturally”: murder, rape, rob, assault, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, and get high. —John Dilulio Jr., November 27, 1995, “The Coming of the Super-Predators” They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called “superpredators.” No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way but first we have to bring them to heel. —Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, January 25, 1996 On February 24, 2016, a Black Lives Matter activist named Ashley Wil- liams confronted presidential candidate Hillary Clinton about the above quote from 1996. Williams insisted that Clinton owed an apology for mass incarceration. Williams declared, “I’m not a ‘superpredator,’ Hillary Clin- ton. Can you apologize to black people for mass incarceration?” Mrs. Clin- ton replied that no one had asked her that question before (Scott 2016). After receiving that nonanswer, Williams was led away. A month and a half later, on April 7, 2016, former president Bill Clinton publicly expressed his * For additional information, including original content and an analysis of the 2016 Bureau of Justice Statistics Survey of Inmates data set (due out in 2019), please visit www.punishingthevul- nerable.com.
Previous Page Next Page