Protecting Volunteer Firefighters and Emergency Responders Act of 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. BOOKER. Madam President, I rise today to discuss an issue that I believe should be discussed and worked on so much more in Congress. It demands an urgency of action, a dedication, and a focus to address our shortfalls as a nation to live up to our ideals, liberty and justice for all. Equal justice under the law is written on the Supreme Court, and is a theme of our Nation.

It is the source of anguish that I believe is driving protests all over our country right now. From Ferguson to Staten Island, from New Jersey to Oakland, citizens of all races and all backgrounds--Americans are joining together to call for change, and to have this idea that our legal system really should be a justice system.

Now this is an anguish that is not simply the result and the reaction to specific incidents. Yes, there is much discussion about those specific incidents in places such as Staten Island, but it is a reflection of a deeper anguish, an unfinished American business that has lasted for decades.

I feel in my own personal life this sense of gratitude for my unique upbringing. As a young man in 1969, my parents literally had to get a white couple to pose as them to buy the house I grew up in in New Jersey. They literally had to go through the indignity of trying to break barriers of race to move into a town that was all white at the time.

I stand here to tell you I grew up in the greatest place. The citizens of Harrington Park, NJ, are why I am standing here right now. The love and caring that exists in my State is remarkable.

I am also here today because of a city that is a majority Black city, Newark, NJ, that embraced me as a young professional, and where I eventually became mayor.

Through my unique position, I have to say I am able to understand all corners of this country. In an intimate way, I see this anguish that I speak of with so many of my friends and colleagues. I heard it here in the Senate. I have had security guards pull me aside to talk to me about their anguish and frustrations about the criminal justice system. I have had the people who do the work in this body--those who clean our floors or tend to the needs of our Senators--and they feel this frustration about an American legal system that is falling short of American ideals and is not a justice system.

I saw it with my own parents who, with agony and pain, talked to me about not having a margin of error when it comes to dealing with police officers. They would coach me on how I should speak and talk and what I should do with my hands because of the fears they had of the treatment I might have that would be different than other Americans.

I stand today because this cannot simply be reduced to a racial issue. This is the larger questions of justice in our country. This calls to the consciousness of all Americans, and it is sourced by the realities we face in this country where we lead the globe in areas that no American who believes in freedom and liberty should want to lead.

We have had over the last decades of my lifetime an explosion in incarceration that belies the truth of who we are. This Nation has seen this country have an 800-percent increase in the Federal prison population over the last 30 years. Think about that--an 800-percent increase. We now have the very ignominious distinction on the globe for leading the planet Earth in a country that incarcerates its own citizens. In fact, America is just 5 percent of the globe's population, but we have 25 percent of the world's imprisoned people, and I tell you that is not because Americans have a greater proclivity for criminality, it is because our legal system is not a justice system.

This overincarceration and overcriminality anguishes this Nation, aggravates divisions, undermines freedom and liberty and costs taxpayers so much more money.

It is an unnecessary burden and expense that is a self-inflicted wound in this Nation that undermines our prosperity and our success. We spend $ 1/4 trillion a year locking people up, and the majority of those people are nonviolent offenders.

In fact, over the last decade, right now in America there are more people in prison for drug offenses than all of the people in prison in the 1970s. It is an extraordinary fact. Whether you are Black or White, if you get arrested and charged with a felony crime for doing some things that the last three Presidents of the United States admitted to doing, and then tried and convicted--I say ``tried'' with hesitancy because the majority of them are plea bargains. As the President knows, if you get convicted of that felony offense, the nondrug violent offense, the collateral consequences to your life are horrendous.

We now live in a nation where the collateral consequences are profound. We now know that time behind bars, even for these nonviolent offenders, reduces people's hourly wages by 11 percent, their annual employment by 9 weeks, their annual earnings by 40 percent. It has a powerful economic impact.

If a person is convicted for possession of controlled substances use, they become ineligible for so many benefits that we would often think we would want these very people to have. They can't get Federal education grants such as a Pell grant. They can't get loans or work assistance. They become ineligible for business licenses, outrageously so. A person convicted of a felony will be denied public housing, even the ability to visit their family in public housing. They could be kicked out of their current housing arrangements. Former inmates can't get jobs, shelter, or loans. They often feel that no option exists other than going back to that slippery slope toward more crime. That is for all the people within the criminal system.
But what is anguishing so many is the clear and undeniable applications of this criminal justice system and the applications of this legal system in unequal ways to different portions of our population.

In my life I have seen that firsthand--how the usage of drugs in different communities where there is no difference between Blacks and Whites is treated differently based upon their race or their socioeconomic status.

Let me be clear. These issues are American issues, not simply race issues. They affect us all because we are a nation with a profound declaration of independence, but the truth of our country speaks also to an interdependence. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

I point out these facts to let you understand why we have to have such an urgency. African Americans and Whites have no difference in drug usage whatsoever, but an African American who chooses to use marijuana is 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for that usage than someone who is White.

In fact, between 2007 and 2009, drug sentences for African-American men were 13.1 percent longer than those for White men. Usage has no difference, but arrest rates are dramatically higher for African-American men. In fact, for all crimes, when you start breaking the actual data down, you see patterns of discriminatory impact that are unacceptable in a nation this great.

Even for police violence, we have to understand that today nearly 2.5 times more Whites are arrested than Blacks for crimes that are violent and nonviolent--2.5 times more arrests for Whites than Blacks, but somehow African Americans are 21 more times more likely to be shot dead by a police officer.

This is data that should not shock us along racial lines but shock us along American lines. We are the Nation of liberty and justice for all. We are the country of equal protection under the law. African Americans make up just 13 percent of our population but 40 percent of the prison population.

In New Jersey, African Americans are 13.7 percent of New Jersey's population but 62 percent of New Jersey's prison population. Much of that, as clearly the data shows, has come about through the persecution of the American drug policy that is applied to different groups and different effects. The reality for minorities is punishing. By the age of 23, 44 percent of Latino youth will be arrested. We know the sad reality that 1 in 3 black males born in America today can expect, if we make no changes, to be incarcerated at some point in their lives compared to 1 in 87 White males, ages 18 to 64, incarcerated, while 1 in every 12 Blacks is.

I struggled with these issues my whole life. As a mayor of a city constantly working to fight to protect citizens, I know how complicated these problems can be. My police department, ourselves, we dug into the data. We saw that our practices had to be changed, that we had to find better ways of keeping our community safe, but we also knew something deeper. I will never forget when I sat with the head of the FBI in Newark, and I asked him about the violent crime problem: How are we going to solve this problem?

He looked at me and said: You don't understand, Mayor. We--meaning law enforcement--are not going to solve this problem. What has to be done are changes greater than this.

I watched how young kids get arrested for breaking the law, for smoking marijuana or being caught with possession. Teenagers find themselves--because they have marijuana on them of a certain amount and weight so the charges increase, to being in a school zone which is every place in many cities--now facing mandatory minimums of upwards of 5 years. These teenagers are scared, afraid, knowing they broke the law, but other folks like the last three Presidents have gotten away with it. They get offered it by the prosecutor,

overworked, trying hard to serve the public and keep people safe. The prosecutor doesn't give them the mandatory minimum, they give them a deal: Just take time served or a month or 6 months, but they find themselves with a felony conviction. Now they find themselves in a world where they think they have no options. They can't get jobs. They can't get education grants. They can't get hope.

Hopelessness is a toxic state of being, and those kids then often get caught up again into the underground economy, back into the world of drugs.

What we saw in my time as mayor is that so many of the people who ultimately end up being violent criminals started as kids who felt all their options closed in on them because they got caught up in this world of drugs.

One of the worst collateral consequences of the way we are going about prosecuting our criminal legal system is the violence we are seeing from people who think they have no options but to do what they are doing.

I say this all to simply say we must find a way out. If we are America, a system that believes in elevating human potential and believes in ideas of liberty and freedom and deplores this concept that government should take people's liberty for no good means, we have to do something about this issue.

We who believe in freedom, who tell the world to look at our light and our torch and our promise, should evidence something better than leading the globe in incarcerating our own citizens. We, this country, where generation after generation has conquered discrimination against Irish, has conquered discrimination against Italians, has beat back discrimination against Catholics, has stood up to discrimination against Jews, has fought against Jim Crow and slavery; advancing not toward Black ideals or Jewish ideals or Irish ideals, but the common ideals that bind us as brothers and sisters of justice, of freedom, of equality--we have to do better than lead the globe in incarceration, to have a legal system that subjects more of its people and minorities toward search and scrutiny than seizure and arrest. This we cannot tolerate.

Why I stand so confidently with a faith in my Nation that we can do better does not just stem from this hallowed history. It also stems from the President. Right now in America there are States doing incredible things, incredible things, to change away this reality.

I am proud of my State. We have gone far but not far enough. In New Jersey, between 1999 and 2012, we reduced our prison population 26 percent. Guess what. During that same period of time, New Jersey saw a 30-percent reduction in violent crime. We showed to America that we are better than this. We can give more liberty to people, lowering our prison population, having a disproportionate effect on minorities, and actually drive down crime as well.

We are not the only State. New York's prison population is down 24 percent from the late 1990s. This is due almost entirely to reforms of the Rockefeller drug laws, policies that sent thousands of people to prison often serving sentences for low-level crimes. Over that same period, New York reduced its crime by more than half, lowering prison populations, disproportionately affecting African Americans and Latinos and lowering crimes.

Texas reduced its prison population in 2013 dramatically and has seen decreases in both crime and recidivism rates. All of these States can do more, but why has the Federal Government done little to nothing to follow suit?

I am proud of what is going on in the Senate with many of my colleagues. I came and joined this body when people pulled together to begin legislation such as the Smarter Sentencing Act or, more recently, the REDEEM Act I did in partnership with Rand Paul.

I am so proud that this issue cuts across political sides, that we have Democrats and Republicans, red States and blue States, all beginning to say we can do better. I am here today to end my remarks with that call to the consciousness of our country. If we have an injustice in our midst with a legal system that is so far away from the justice system to which we should aspire, we have to do better.

I was raised to believe that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. In the words of Langston Hughes: ``There's a dream in this land with its back against the wall; to save the dream for one, we must save the dream for all.''

I know in my heart that with anguish of millions of Americans being punished by a legal system that has gone way out of control, affecting Blacks and Whites, young people of all backgrounds, a legal system that patently has a discriminatory impact on minorities, a legal system that steals the people's liberty, we can do better than this. We can save taxpayer money. We can lower our prison incarceration rates. We can elevate the promise of so many now denied their promise, and we can celebrate our American ideals. We need to lead this globe, not in incarceration, by telling the truth of who we are; that America is a land of freedom, of justice, where there truly is liberty and justice for all.

Thank you.

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