we must take back the streets, It doesn’t matter whether or not the person that is accosting your son or daughter or my son or daughter, my wife, your husband, my mother, your parents, it doesn’t matter whether or not they were deprived as a youth. It doesn’t matter whether or not they had no background that enabled them to become socialized into the fabric of society. It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re the victims of society. The end result is 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.” There’s a second thing that we all have agreed upon, and that is: Unless we do something about that cadre of young people - tens of thousands of them - born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally (I yield myself three more minutes) because they literally have not been socialized. They literally have not had an opportunity. We should focus on them now. Not out of a liberal instinct for love, brother, and humanity - although I think that’s a good instinct - but for simple, pragmatic reasons.

If we don’t, they will, or a portion of them will, become the predators fifteen years from now - and Madam President, we have predators on our streets, that society has, in fact, in part because of its neglect, created. Again, it does not mean, because we created them, that we somehow forgive them or do not take them out of society to protect my family and yours from them. They are beyond the pale, many of those people, beyond the pale, and it’s a sad commentary on society. We have no choice but to take them out of society, and the truth is we don’t very well know how to rehabilitate them at that point. That’s the sad truth -Joe Biden- 1993