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Twitter users have reacted with surprise and fury over excerpts from Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book It Takes A Village. On June 6, Jeanette Jing, an activist with over 33,000 followers on Twitter who supports Clinton’s Democratic opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders, shared two pages of the work in which Clinton reminisces about the black prisoners who worked in the Arkansas governor’s mansion she shared with her husband, Bill Clinton, who led the state from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992.

“When we moved in, I was told that using prison labor at the governor’s mansion was a longstanding tradition, which kept down costs,” Clinton writes. She adds that most of the workers were convicted murderers and she became friendly with “a few of them, African-American men in their thirties who had already served 12 to 18 years of their sentences.”

Despite her alleged friendships with these men, Clinton tells her readers: “We enforced rules strictly and sent back to prison any inmate who broke a rule.” Despite having no psychological qualifications, she later asserts that these men did not have “inferior IQs or an inability to apply moral reasoning” but instead they may have been “emotional illiterates.”

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