Former President Bill Clinton on Wednesday admitted that policies passed during his administration are, at least, partially to blame for the overcrowding of U.S. prisons, CNN reported.

Clinton acknowledged the troubling effects of the federal "three strikes" provision, which he signed into law as part of a 1994 omnibus crime bill and which mandates life sentences for those convicted of a violent felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug crimes.

"The problem is the way it was written and implemented is we cast too wide a net, and we had too many people in prison," the former president told CNN's Christiane Amanpour.

"And we wound up ... putting so many people in prison that there wasn't enough money left to educate them, train them for new jobs and increase the chances when they came out so they could live productive lives," he added.

Clinton's wife, Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton, had argued last week that the U.S. criminal justice system focuses too much on incarceration.

"Keeping (people) behind bars does little to reduce crime, but it does a lot to tear apart families," the former secretary of state noted. "Our prisons and our jails are now our mental health institutions."

But as first lady, Clinton had defended her husband's legislation as a "well-thought out crime bill that is both smart and tough," CNN recalled.

"We will finally be able to say, loudly and clearly, that for repeat, violent, criminal offenders: three strikes and you're out," she said in 1994. "We are tired of putting you back in through the revolving door," the then-first lady insisted.

Over the past two decades, though, the Justice Department has found the number of U.S. prisoners has grown disproportionately compared with the country's overall population, the Washington Post noted.

The total of inmates in federal and state prisons who were sentenced to a year or longer grew from 405,000 to over 1.3 million between 1983 and 2011, the newspaper detailed. That change amounts to an increase of 225 percent during a period in which the population only grew by about a third.