Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016--Conference Report--

Floor Speech

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Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I want to thank Mike Lee for coming to the floor and speaking with such heart and conviction. Also, I want to thank Senator Durbin for his stand on the floor today.

Please understand, Senator Lee, Senator Grassley, Senator Durbin, Senator Leahy, and so many Senators on both sides of the aisle have been speaking on this issue for years. In fact, since before I became a U.S. Senator, this moment has come. As Senator Durbin began talking about the issues of the day, where there is so much frustration, so much concern, so much consternation, so much divisiveness on this issue of criminal justice in America, it made me think personally about this idea of hope because this week I have talked to a lot of people who seem to be indulging in a dangerous, toxic state of being, which is hopelessness about criminal justice issues in our country.

I have appreciated Senator Durbin, who has not just been a senior Senator, not just been steadfast in working on this issue, but he has been a friend, calling me up, not just this past week but weeks before, when lots of Americans were indulging in hopelessness about the divisiveness in our country, about the injustices in our country, about the ravages of a broken criminal justice system.

As I have been thinking about hopelessness, I keep coming back to this understanding, taught to me by teachers on the streets of Newark, NJ, that hope does not exist in an abstract; that hope is the active conviction that no matter how bad things get, despair will not have the last word; that hope is a choice that must be made amidst hopelessness; that amidst despair, amidst frustration, you have to choose hope; and that choosing hope means you commit yourself to a process that doesn't divide this country but that unifies it with the conviction that we can be a nation that makes real the words we pledge when we say we are a nation, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

This week we need those words. We need that hope. Mike Lee and Dick Durbin, two politicians on opposite sides of the spectrum, said: Hey, this is a time that we should be pushing hope, indivisibility, and we have a bill that addresses issues at the core of so much of the frustration going on. It doesn't solve all the issues, it doesn't wave a wand, but it will advance us toward liberty and justice for all because, unequivocally, we have gone off the rails.

Since 1980, the land of the free broke with the rest of the world and became the incarceration nation. Our prison population has exploded since 1980. The Federal prison population is up 800 percent. Our overall prison population is up 500 percent. We have only about 5 percent of the globe's population, but one out of every four incarcerated people on the planet Earth are right here in America.

In response to a criminal justice system that has lost its proportionality in its punishment and that seems to have become more about retribution than restorative justice, a criminal justice system that is rife with the stories that Mike Lee talked about when he talked about Weldon Angelos and a judge who himself cried out about the injustice of sentencing someone to 55 years for a nonviolent drug crime or Alton Mills, whom Senator Durbin spoke about, who was sentenced to life in prison for a nonviolent drug crime, we in America went off the rails.

I am hopeful today because on the right and the left, not just Members of this body but from the Koch brothers to Newt Gingrich, to Grover Norquist, to the ACLU, people on both sides of the political spectrum said we can do better because this broken criminal justice system is hurting us. Rather than being a tool for public safety and social order, as was intended by our criminal justice system, it instead became an industry and an end to itself. It became a massive exploding bureaucracy, draining our economic prosperity.

In fact, one study has shown we would have 20 percent less poverty in America if our incarceration rates were similar to our industrial peers. This has been a divisive drain on our cohesive society, a misappropriation of taxpayer funds.

While our infrastructure has been crumbling, we have led the planet Earth in building out a prison infrastructure. In fact, between the time I was in law school in the mid-1990s to the time I became mayor of Newark, we were building a new prison in this country every 10 days.

Congress has increased Federal spending on prisons alone by 45 percent since about the year 2000. Congress has cut spending on the things that keep us safe, such as law enforcement at the State level, by 76 percent--putting someone like Weldon Angelos in prison for 55 years, hundreds of thousands of dollars in a long, disproportionate sentence for a nonviolent crime that could have gone to public safety, like hiring police officers for our community. What is painful to me in this time is that our criminal justice system--the data that I gave would be painful enough, but our criminal justice system clearly disproportionately affects poor people, leading authors like Bryan Stevenson to say that we have a criminal justice system that seems to treat you better if you are rich and guilty than poor and innocent.

Blacks and Whites have no difference in America in using or selling drugs, but African Americans are about 3.6 times more likely to get arrested for selling drugs. Instead of a criminal justice system that unites us under principles of justice and fairness, we see it disproportionately persecuting groups because they are poor or because they are of color.

If you look at Latinos, they account for the largest group of offenders convicted of offenses that have a mandatory minimum at 38 percent. Native Americans are grossly overrepresented in the criminal justice system with an incarceration rate 38 percent higher than the national average.

Eighty percent of Americans in our criminal justice system are represented by public defenders, meaning that they are deemed by the court to be indigent, to be too poor to afford an attorney.

Our justice system does not reflect our values. This drug war is not being carried out in a way that is fair or just, and it is not just hurting the poor, the mentally ill, the drug addicted, the minorities. It hurts all Americans because it drains our resources; it drains our treasure. When I say ``treasure,'' I don't just mean money. We have come to a point in America today where millions of children have had parents who are incarcerated, and it hurts generationally the best of our Nation, the promise of our Nation.

The irony about our lack of action in putting this bill to a vote is that States are already moving more quickly than we are. Red States, Georgia and Mississippi and Texas, have been doing things for years that we have been proposing in this bill, and have yet to enact, that have shrunk their prison populations. Guess what has happened in States such as Texas and Georgia and Mississippi, which have lowered their prison populations. Guess what happened. Their crime went down, as well, because when you have a system that is not about retribution but about restorative justice, that has proportionality in sentences, you not only save money for your State, but you also empower people to succeed and lower crime.

When States start to put drug addicts in treatment as opposed to jail, it empowers people to succeed, saves money, and lowers the prison population. It is common sense. Red states have acted. We have seen the success. But in the Federal prison population, there is an 800 percent increase. It takes away money that should be spent on homeland security, money that should be spent on investing in public safety, money that should be spent for our public universities, money that should be saved for the taxpayers but is now going, still fueling one of the biggest growing bureaucracies we have seen in the last 40 years.

This calls for unity in our country. I tell you, we have unity. When I can stand in partnership with Mike Lee and Chuck Grassley, when you have people like Patrick Leahy and Dick Durbin--these folks are not normally mentioned together as partners on legislation, but I am proud that some of the most esteemed Members, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, both agree that we can put more justice in our justice system. We can do something to reverse this trend, and we can begin to put rationality back so that the values of this country are made more real.

I am proud to have negotiated and worked with Chairman Grassley, who is sitting across the aisle from me right now. I am honored. In the 3 years I have been in the Senate, one of the more proud things that I have accomplished is to find common ground with my Republican colleagues on the other side in a bill that I know--from the neighborhood and block that I live on to across the country--would make a difference.

Now we have encountered some sclerosis, some blockage. A dam exists between where we stand now and greater justice for our Nation. This has been a tough week. It has been a week of frustration and grief and sadness. This is a time that we should choose hope. It is a time that we should choose unity. It is a time that this very body should be saying to America: Hey, we have challenges, but we can find common ground. We can come together, left and right, Black and White. We can do better than we are doing now. It is a hard walk that we have ahead, but this body can start leading on issues of justice.

There have been other difficult times in our country when this body answered the call. There have been times where people were fearful, people doubted, and there have been times where people felt their heart was heavy. I am proud that, in our history, it was in those times that leaders emerged and chose hope.

My prayer is that in the waning days of this Congress, with all the important things we have on our agenda, we remember that there are people right now who are stuck in despair. There are people who don't believe in our indivisibility, as we say in our Pledge of Allegiance. There are people who are frustrated. It is my hope, when it comes to issues of criminal justice, a system that is so obviously broken, that we choose reform; that we choose healing; that we demonstrate unity; that on this issue we bring forward a bipartisan bill that begins to cast away some of the darkness that hangs over our country with the light and wisdom that is in this bill that reflects both sides of the political aisle and, I believe, that reflects the best of who we are as a body.

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