Not Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden.

A Critical Item in dealing with crime is that the criminals need to be punished. And that punishment must be meted out swiftly, consistently, and commensurate with the crime.  Joe Biden?

However.

A Critical Item in dealing with criminal behavior is rehabilitation of the criminal and opportunities for his redemption. Absent those, the criminals will repeat their criminal behavior, others will see less, if not in absolute terms, little incentive not to do the crime.  Joe Biden?

Here’s Joe Biden’s position on those two Critical Items (patience; it takes a bit for Alphabet’s YouTube to grunt through their errors and load the video).  This is Senator Joe Biden:

It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re the victims of society. The end result is that they’re about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons. So I don’t want to ask, “What made them do this?” They must. be taken. off. the streets.

Indeed, he favored—has long favored—increased and broad incarceration.

You must take back the streets. And you take back the streets by more cops, more prisons, more physical protection for the people.

Here is Joe Biden explicitly on rehabilitation;

So you cannot make rehabilitation a condition for release. I don’t care why someone is a malefactor in society, I don’t care why someone is antisocial, I don’t care why they’ve become a sociopath. We have an obligation to cordon them off from the rest of society.

With Joe Biden explicitly rejecting one Critical Item in dealing with crime and with criminal behavior, he cannot truly be supportive of the other Critical Item: the two stand or fall together.

Joe Biden’s claim that rehab can’t be a criterion for release is a cynically offered non sequitur. Whether prisons or separate facilities are the optimal place for rehab and for opportunities for redemption is a separate question entirely, and one that he will not even consider. Joe Biden does not believe in the ability of a man to rehabilitate or to be rehabilitated, and he rejects the possibility of redemption.

Joe Biden cannot be tough on crime because he cannot accept rehabilitation or redemption. He cannot support programs that reduce recidivism, that enable a criminal, once punished, to find a legitimate place in society.

Joe Biden’s current “evolution” in his thinking and his pious calls for criminal system reform are nothing more than insulting pandering to blacks and Hispanics and insults to the intelligence of all of us Americans of any skin color or gender.

H/t OANN.