As Judiciary Committee chairman, Biden was a leading advocate for massive tough-on-crime legislation such as the 1994 federal crime bill that stiffened sentences, widened application of the death penalty, added police officers to the streets, and provided funding for new prisons. Crime in America had tripled between 1960 and 1990, inflamed by a crack-cocaine epidemic in the 1980s. Working with police groups, Biden wrote the Senate version of the bill, which he used to proudly call the Biden Crime Bill. When Congress passed the new law with bipartisan support, it was not considered terribly controversial. But in recent years, it has been seen as contributing to the plague of mass incarceration. The passage of time has changed the public’s perspective of the law, and the quarter-century-old legislation surfaced as a point of controversy in the 2020 Democratic primaries, forcing Biden to defend his role in shaping it.