CHARLESTON, S.C. Joe Biden has gotten a lot of flack for his support of the 1994 crime bill , his signature legislative achievement in the Senate that has been blamed for an increase in the U.S. prison population.

But evidence suggests the decades-old law will be less of an issue for him as he continues to lead the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2020 election .

Experts say the sprawling legislation, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, contributed to both a decline in crime and an increase in mass incarceration. It expanded the federal death penalty and created dramatically harsher sentencing laws, including a three-strikes provision that mandated life terms for people with at least three federal violent crime or drug convictions. It also gave states incentives to lock criminals up for longer periods of time and provided billions in funding for new prisons.

Good people signed on to that bill. People make mistakes. But lets hold them to that, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), a 2020 rival, said in an interview with HuffPost last month. That crime bill was shameful, what it did to black and brown communities like mine [and] low-income communities from Appalachia to rural Iowa. It was a bad bill.

Biden has continued to defend the law, telling voters last month there were a lot of the good things in the bill (it also contained a ban on assault weapons and the initial version of the Violence Against Women Act). He said it did not generate mass incarceration.

Bidens defense of the law doesnt appear to be costing him support among African Americans, though. In South Carolina, where over 60% of Democrats are black, Biden holds a commanding 20-point lead over the rest of the crowded primary field, according to a recent poll .

Asked if he faulted Biden for his role in getting the 1994 crime bill through the Senate, Lee Moultrie, a black civil rights activist from Charleston, South Carolina, said, Hell, no.

People made decisions based on the time, Moultrie said. You cant come back 20 years later and say, OK, you shouldnt have done this. The information they had led them to make some decisions that they made. Now, we might see it might not be effective as we wanted it to be, and that it created some problems that we didnt want to have, but we have to give that a pass.

Standing in line to see several candidates address black economic issues at a presidential forum in Charleston over the weekend, Moultrie, who remains undecided in the election, argued that African American leaders and community members share some responsibility for not working harder to stop the law at the time.

The black elected officials could have stood up. Everyone who had some concern, where were they at? The black fraternities, the black sororities, they could have stood up, Moultrie said. You cant blame one person or the Congress, because you could be advocating against something if you dont like it.

The law was backed at the time by the Congressional Black Caucus as well as several big-city black mayors and clergy leaders who were alarmed at soaring crime rates across the country.

Sonya Fordham, a schoolteacher from Charleston who also attended the forum, said that Bidens time in the White House as Barack Obamas vice president outweighed his involvement with the 1994 crime law.

I think people do change. Politics does make you change. This country is about change, Fordham said, after stating her 2020 preference for Biden first and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) second. I think that he did a lot for me when he was No. 2 for Obama.

She added: It takes a lot for a white man to be second, OK? And that says a lot to me, right there.