First Step Act II

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I want to thank the Presiding Officer and acknowledge my friend, whom I deeply admire, sitting in the chair. It is great to give this short speech in front of him. It is good to see the Presiding Officer, my friend.

I want to say good afternoon to everyone, and this is a moment in which I want to give a sense of gratitude.

I want to thank my colleagues for their incredible work and leadership and, especially, recognize the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Chuck Grassley. I want to thank Senator Dick Durbin, who has been a hero of mine on the issue of criminal justice reform, as well as Mike Lee, who has been a champion, all of their staffs, everyone who is involved in the tireless work and effort that has been going on in what is the pending bill on the floor before us now, the FIRST STEP Act.

I also want to recognize the incredible people--many of them advocates, many of them citizens, many of them activists. So many of the groups have been pushing, challenging, demanding that we have criminal justice reform in this country. A lot of these groups have been organized and working for years and years--years before I came to the Senate--to try to bring forward criminal justice reform. They brought insight, wisdom, and they helped to shape this legislation. Their advocacy has made this a better bill.

It is because of the work and the diversity of voices that have been involved in this process that we stand poised today to pass this bill, to begin to deliver some reforms to our savagely broken criminal justice system.

I am proud of this coalition. I am proud that the coalition has people all across the political spectrum. I am proud that the coalition has people from diverse backgrounds. This is how change has been made in this country for generations.

I want to return to the fact that we are poised to pass this bill because of the deeply, savagely broken criminal justice system that we have.

Since 1980 alone, our Federal prison population has exploded by 800 percent. There has been an 800-percent increase in our prison population. This is because of failed policies by this body that created harsh sentencing, harsh mandatory minimum penalties--three strikes and you are out. These are the bills that caused this exploding population of prisoners to become the largest in terms of percentage on the planet Earth.

America is now the preeminent incarceration Nation. We are the incarcerating capital of the planet Earth. Even though we only have 5 percent of the world's population, one in four of the incarcerated people on the planet are in the United States of America. One in three of all incarcerated women on the planet Earth are here in the United States of America.

Today, close to one-third of all adults in the United States have a criminal record. We have criminalized the United States population. About one-third of Americans have a criminal record.

After decades of failed Federal policies and after decades of going in the wrong direction, we now have an opportunity to reverse course in a significant way.

Our criminal justice system, as it stands right now, is an affront to whom we say we are as a nation. We profess--we swear an oath to the flag that we are a nation of ``liberty and justice for all,'' but our criminal justice system violates those values.

I believe you can tell a lot about a nation--not by its buildings, not by its structures or its wealth, but you can tell a lot about the true character of a nation by looking at its prisons and seeing whom they incarcerate. You can go to countries with authoritarian regimes and see how they imprison their political opposition. You can go to some countries and see they actually incarcerate members of the media. We don't do that in the United States.

In this country, if you go into our prisons and our jails, you see, overwhelmingly, that we incarcerate those who are marginalized in our society, those who are vulnerable in our society. Overwhelmingly, in the United States, our prisons and jails are full of those Americans who are already hurting and struggling and often need more help than a system that hurts them. Our prisons and jails have become warehouses for people who are struggling with trauma, struggling with disease, struggling with illness. Right now, our prisons and jails are filled overwhelmingly with people with mental illness, overwhelmingly with Americans struggling with addiction, overwhelmingly with Americans who are survivors of sexual assault, and also overwhelmingly, it is full of Americans who are low-income, poor folks and people who are disproportionately people of color.

This is a system in our country that feeds upon certain communities and not others. The War on Drugs--which has fueled so much of the explosion of our prison population--has really been a war on certain people and certain communities and not on others. I am the only Senator who lives in a majority Black and Brown community. It is low income, but I can tell you right now, my community does not mistake wealth with worth. I live in an inner-city community, and when I go home at the end of most weeks, I draw strength from my community. I see evidence of the incredible growth that has occurred. These are good people in a city. They pull together, work together, and can accomplish more things than other people who are disrespecting, disregarding, and just plain dissing them don't think is possible. I am proud of my community.

Despite all the work that has been done in the city of Newark, I still live in a community that is both overcriminalized and underprotected because of Federal policies--because of policies in this body that mistake severity of a punishment with the actual security of a people. We know there is no deeper proclivity to commit crime among people of color, but there is a much deeper bias in the way our drug laws have been and are being applied, which disproportionately target people of color and low-income communities.

We have a system that for over a century, we as a nation have overcome slavery--decades of Jim Crow--but author Michelle Alexander calls our criminal justice system ``The New Jim Crow'' because of its disproportionate impact on people of color. We now have a criminal justice system where there are more African-American men under criminal supervision than there were enslaved in 1850. This is a punishing reality that I have seen with my own eyes, where people in certain privileged communities don't face the kind of scrutiny, the kind of arrests that you do in other communities in our country.

The truth about human beings is that all of us make mistakes. That is an inevitable part of life, but the way our country's drug laws are designed and applied, a kid in a more privileged community or on a college campus gets a chance to stumble--to learn a lesson. There is a wide margin for error, but a kid living in a community that is low income or a community that is Black and Brown, gets trapped by a system that disproportionately impacts their lives more than it does others.

Bryan Stevenson said we live in a nation ``that treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent.''

In the USA, we see Americans getting trapped in a system where the data is clear. There is no difference between Blacks and Whites for using drugs or selling drugs in the USA. There is no difference, but if you are Black, you are almost four times more likely to get arrested for selling drugs and almost three times more likely to be arrested for possession of drugs. This is one of the things that has led to such a dramatic racial disparity in incarceration in the USA. People right now in our country are sitting in prisons for doing things that two of the last three Presidents admitted doing, but they encounter a different type of justice system. The scales of justice in America are not balanced. This is a system that hurts people, and it hurts people who are often already struggling, often already hurt.

What we do to people in this country with a nonviolent drug offense is like getting a life sentence for the rest of your life. Even after you have come out of a prison sentence or even if you received no time served at all, once you are convicted of a nonviolent drug offense-- again, like people in this body and in the White House have done before, potentially in this body; I am making no accusations--but once you have been convicted of a crime, for the rest of your life, if you are one of those folks who has been convicted of a nonviolent drug offense, you have to check a box that says you are going to have difficulty being hired, you are going to have difficulty getting housing. You can't get many business licenses. You can't get food stamps. You can't get a loan from the bank. The American Bar Association points to 40,000 collateral consequences that come with a criminal conviction in this country--40,000 collateral consequences that follow you for life for a criminal conviction.

We are debating a funding bill that is dominating the news, but we are already throwing an exorbitant amount of taxpayer dollars into the black hole of mass incarceration. That is not making us safer, and it is not making us stronger. In fact, it is making us a more vulnerable community.

We have been using more government resources--not to offer more support for law enforcement, not to offer more opportunities for Americans to get mental health care, not to help more folks get access to drug treatment, not to rehabilitate people, but we have been spending more and more money actually hurting more Americans by putting them into a system that actually harms them more often than helps them with their addiction, with their mental health issue, with their trauma. We are using our resources to compound hurt and harm that people have already endured to incarcerate more Americans than ever before in our history, which ultimately makes our neighborhoods and communities one that is like mine: less safe, not more.

Despite the fact that our infrastructure in this country is crumbling--that our trains and roads and bridges are in desperate need of repair--we have been investing in a different type of infrastructure. Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison in this country has been opened every 10 days. We spend billions of dollars for the construction of prisons and jails to warehouse human potential: folks who often need help, need counseling, need mental health care, need rehabilitation. We have been taking the far more expensive way and warehousing human beings in our prisons and jails instead of helping them.

We call this system a justice system. It is not meant to be a system of retribution; it is meant to be a justice system. It is not meant to be a system of punishment only; it is meant to be a justice system. We are Americans. We have ideals of restoration and rehabilitation. Ultimately, in the United States of America, we all believe this is a nation where redemption is possible.

One of our former Senate colleagues who stood in this same well got into a lot of trouble in his youth. He was convicted of multiple crimes--crimes like arson and assault. He attacked a police officer. He actually became one of the most serious outspoken advocates for restoring this broken system. It was Senator Alan Simpson. This is what he once wrote. He said:

I was lucky that the bullets I stole from a hardware store as a teenager and fired from my .22-caliber rifle never struck anyone. I was fortunate that the fires I set never hurt anyone. I heard my wake-up call and listened--and I went on to have many opportunities to serve my country and my community.

When a young person is sent ``up the river,'' we need to remember that all rivers can change course.

He went from an arsonist, a person who attacked police officers, and a person who was admittedly guilty of crimes to a Senator because we are a nation that believes in redemption. The fact is, when most people go to prison, 95 percent of those folks right now in State prisons will come back to our communities. The question is, Will they come out further harmed by the system or better able to start again, better able to avoid more criminality or will they be people who actually help to make us safer and stronger, to be elevated toward that ideal of full citizenship?

Those of us in this body who proclaim Christian faith know the story of the prodigal child, that child who did wrong, but yet when he came back, his father embraced him. That story is held in the Christian community as an ideal, but what do we do in America? Is it the story of the prodigal child? It is not because this is a system that right now inflicts harm on those incarcerated rather than trying to rehabilitate them.

This is a system that still subjects young people to what other countries and human rights activists in this Nation call torture: juvenile solitary confinement. This is a system that, in some places, still denies women access to basic sanitary products. This is a system that, in some places, still allows the shackling of pregnant women during birth.

This is a system that burdens families, hurting them economically and fracturing entire communities like the one I live in. It is a system that inflicts poverty by concentrating its attacks on low-income neighborhoods. In fact, according to a study from Villanova University, the poverty rate in all of America would be 20 percent lower if we had incarceration rates in line with our industrial peers. This system, as a whole, is a cancer on the soul of our country, and it is hurting every single American.

Today we have an opportunity to do something about addressing the ills of this system. That is why I am proud this is a bipartisan compromise bill with extraordinary leadership on both sides of the aisle, saying: Hey, there are things we need to begin to correct for this system. There are ways to make this system more fair. There are ways to make this system better reflect our collective values and ideals.

Because of this collection of work done over the last years, this bill includes critical sentencing reform that will reduce mandatory minimums and give judges discretion back--not legislators but judges who sit and see the totality of the facts.

Thanks to the work of Senator Durbin, the racially biased crack cocaine sentencing disparity has already been negotiated down from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1. It should be equal. It should be 1 to 1, but we made progress. The problem was the change wasn't retroactively applied. Because of that, there are people sitting in jail right now for selling an amount of drugs equal to the size of a candy bar who have watched people come in and leave jail for selling enough drugs to fill a suitcase. We never made this change retroactive. That is not justice. Making this fix in this bill alone will mean that thousands of Americans who have more than served their time will become eligible for release, and it addresses some of the racial disparities in our system because 90 percent of the people who will benefit from that are African Americans; 96 percent are Black and Latino.

The bill includes a provision that I have worked on for the past 4 years that will effectively end the use of juvenile solitary confinement among young people under Federal supervision.

This bill also takes an important step but still an incomplete step in reforming the way women are treated behind bars. This bill will ensure that incarcerated women will have access to free sanitary products, and it will ban the shackling of pregnant incarcerated women. Last year, I introduced a bill that includes this reform, among others, and I am happy to see it now as part of this legislation.

Can we do more? Yes. This legislation is the product of compromise. This legislation is just one step in the right direction. If we pass this legislation, it will be a step in the right direction and I hope will be the momentum for greater, urgently needed reforms that will be supported by conservatives in this country and progressives.

Let's make no mistake. This legislation, which is one small step, will affect thousands and thousands of lives. Those are not just some people. When you affect the lives of some Americans on issues of justice, you affect the lives of all Americans because we as a people cannot fall into that trap of separateness, the insidious idea that we think that there are some throwaway people whose dignity we can assault without assaulting our own.

Dr. King said, ``Justice is indivisible,'' and he was right. We cannot separate a system of oppression in our country and think that it won't affect us all as a whole. It could not be further from the truth. You cannot deny justice, deny dignity to any American without its affecting us all. You cannot cheapen justice for some without its cheapening the justice of us all.

As a man much greater than anyone in this body once said, ``Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'' We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality that is tied in a common garment. We cannot suffer the illusion of separation when we think this criminal justice system that is so punishing of some is not hurting this country as a whole. Our criminal justice system, as it stands right now, is a gaping, self-inflicted wound. This bill is a step--a step--towards healing.

It has been perhaps one of the greatest honors of my life--easily one of the greatest honors as a Senator--to have worked in a bipartisan coalition over the last 5 years to get to this point. I have had the opportunity to sit down with people in common cause--from Republicans on the far end of the conservative spectrum to individuals with whom and organizations that on most other issues, I often disagree. Yet we have found common ground because this system is an affront to our most fundamental common values on both sides of the aisle--the value of freedom, the value of liberty, the value of equality, the value of fairness, and the value of justice. We share those common values because we still live in a nation in which the ties that bind us are stronger than the lines that divide us.

This bill is a recognition of the fact that we are bound together as a people by the most precious ideals and humanity--the ideals that were put forth by our Founders, which have been aspired to in every generation and have been worked on in every generation to make us a more perfect Union.

We know that our Nation's history--the bills and debates we have seen in this very body--is scarred by many wretched injustices--slavery and the denial of universal suffrage, Jim Crow and segregation. Like people--individuals who have done wrong in the past--our Nation has demonstrated the capacity to change. We as a nation have demonstrated the capacity to improve. Like people, we have demonstrated as a nation the capacity to redeem ourselves. None of us should ever be judged by the least of what we have done but, instead, by our ability and our capacity to find redemption.

Every generation has worked to make our ideals more true and real, which makes the dream more accessible to us all. We have stood for each other and have worked with each other. We have sacrificed with each other despite our differences in race and differences in color and differences in religion and creed. Every single great gain in this country has been made by multiethnic, multiracial, broad-based coalitions because we recognize the ideal that is above the President's desk, written in stone here, which is the ideal of E pluribus unum-- ``out of many, one.'' We know that it is not just a slogan, that those aren't just words; it is a calling to the people of this country.

I want to see more than the bill we have today. I know we can do more than just this bill we have today, but this is a first step. It is a necessary step. For the sake of thousands of Americans whose lives will be directly affected, this is a step in the right direction. I hope that we all come together and make this first step our momentum on the journey. We have work to do in this country, and I am proud to have been a part of what can be an historic step in the right direction. May our work continue.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source