Maybe this will seal the deal. When Carper was elected to the Senate in 2000, the Washington Post profiled all the new senators, including Carper. Carper was coming off of his two terms as governor, and he was proud of this record:
During his time in the House, Carper, a Navy veteran who has an MBA, developed a record as a moderate who focused on some of Delaware’s more abiding interests, including allowing banks into the securities business and preventing ocean dumping of sludge.
As a governor, his record took a somewhat more conservative twist. His “Better Chance” welfare reform program limited payments to four years, required recipients to work, denied additional payments to families that continued to have children and cut welfare rolls by about a quarter in two years. He built additional prisons, pushed for longer sentences served, and initiated public school choice and charter schools.
Carper’s stint as governor coincided with the Senate and House committees ‘to combat drug abuse’. Minimum mandatories and what Carper proudly proclaimed as the largest prison expansion in Delaware history. Carper joined forces with the most racist of all legislators: Tom Sharp, Jim Vaughn and Wayne Smith. Oh, and future ‘judge’ Jane Brady. The results? the Black incarceration rate doubled, doubled, during the Carper years in Dover. Carper signed every single bill coming out of those noxious committees and a legislative body cowed by the demagoguery of Sharp and Smith.
You know who was the first legislator to raise alarms about this prison expansion? Not someone you’d expect. It was Sussex County Sen. Bob Venables who, as chair of the Bond Bill Committee, warned that the prison expansion was taking tens of millions of dollars away from fixing roads and repairing schools.
Tom Carper was, and remains, part of the problem. While the prisons have been constructed, Delaware’s budget is strained by the ‘need’ for more correctional officers to staff the overcrowded facilities. 18 years after he left Dover for DC, the problems that Carper created continue to suffocate the state’s budget. 18 years after Carper left, his acolyte, John Carney, is considering shipping prisoners out of state. Explain to me again why any Democrat who doesn’t share the racial animus of a Tom Sharp should vote for Carper.
I can’t.
And while you’re at it, go ahead and vote for Chris Johnson for AG, the only candidate for the office who has never been part of the problem, and offers the only comprehensive plan to reform our failed money pit of a corrections system and restore funding to state priorities like health care and public education. The power is in your hands.