Congressional Black Caucus

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. JEFFRIES. Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentlewoman from Ohio, my good friend, the distinguished and dynamic anchor for tonight's Special Order, Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, for yielding and for her continued leadership and for leading the discussion on the House floor today as it relates the urgency of this Congress and America dealing with the school-to-prison pipeline mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex that so many of my colleagues have explained and exposed here on the House floor today.

A few years ago I had a conversation that has always stuck with me in the area of criminal justice when I was speaking to a formally incarcerated individual who spent several years behind bars incarcerated in a New York State penitentiary. He has turned his life around and he is now an advocate for criminal justice reform. He said to me on his final day, after being imprisoned for years in upstate New York, that he had a conversation with a high-ranking corrections officer, a supervisor who he had gotten to know and thought he had befriended to some degree during his time of incarceration.

On that last day, he said to this young African American incarcerated individual who was on his way out, he said: I just want to thank you.

This gentleman was a little perplexed. He wasn't sure what he was talking about. He said: I just want to thank you for helping me to get my boat; and beyond that, I want to thank your son, who is going to help my son get his boat as well.

That conversation has really haunted me because, in such a powerful and profound way, what it captures is the essence of what the prison industrial complex represents, which is this decision that was made in so many parts of the United States of America, certainly in New York, by Democrats and Republicans.

When the automobile factories and the steel mills, the manufacturing plants began to close in the 1970s and in the 1980s, devastating parts of the upstate economy, a decision was made in place of those factory jobs to build prisons in their place as a means of economic development for depressed upstate communities. But here is the problem. If you build it, someone has got to fill those prisons. In order to fill those prisons, several things have developed which we are in the process of trying to dismantle right now: the school-to-prison pipeline and the criminalization of young people, particularly in communities of color, where they basically are not given a chance from the very beginning. As a result of being channeled unjustly, often, into the criminal justice system at an early age, they essentially become economic commodities for those who have come to rely on prisons to replace the factory and manufacturing jobs that have left the United States of America.

That has been a big problem in New York. It is a problem in other parts of the country. It is a shame here in the United States of America that we have gone from a place where, when the war on drugs began in 1971--President Nixon declared drug abuse public enemy number one--there were less than 350,000 people incarcerated in America. Even when the crime bill that is being heavily debated in the public domain right now was passed in 1994, at the height of the concern about crime here in the United States of America, the incarcerated population was still under 900,000 people. But we have gone from less than 350,000 in 1971 to under 900,000 in 1994 to more than 2.2 million in 2016.

The United States has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's incarcerated individuals. We incarcerate more people than any other country in the world, and it is shameful. The school-to-prison pipeline is a large part of that dynamic, along with the failed war on drugs. So we are going to have to deal with this situation in a meaningful way.

The statistics clearly show that, if you suspend a young person, that individual--often a Black or Latino boy--is less likely to graduate and complete school and more likely to become entangled in the criminal justice system because we have applied an overly punitive approach to discipline, particularly in the inner city.

Now, in this Chamber, I have seen surprising levels of compassion as it relates to dealing with the heroin and opioid crisis that is sweeping across America right now, and I am glad that folks have decided to take a different approach than the approach that was taken in the 1980s with the crack cocaine epidemic that was sweeping across communities that those of us in the Congressional Black Caucus represent.

I welcome this newfound compassion. I just hope that you would extend it now not just to the manner in which we deal with the heroin crisis-- that is important--but let's extend it to the overcriminalization that is taking place as relates to young people across America, particularly in Black and Brown communities.

I am glad that we have become enlightened as it relates to moving away from punishment and toward prevention and intervention related to the heroin and opioid crisis. Let's also become enlightened in terms of dealing with breaking the school-to-prison pipeline.

We will have more to say as we move forward with this discussion, but I know there are other Members who would like to contribute to this hour of power that Representative Joyce Beatty has brought to the House floor in connection with the CBC Special Order.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source