The United States is home to 5 percent of the world’s population, but houses 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. New Jersey’s junior U.S. senator has become a leading voice in the national effort to reform criminal justice. He’s convening thought leaders in the state tonight and NJTV News Correspondent Erin Delmore is moderating that discussion.
Delmore: I’m here at North Stelton A.M.E. Church in Piscataway where I’ll be joined by some of the nation and New Jersey’s foremost experts on criminal justice reform. I’m here now with Sen. Cory Booker from New Jersey. He’s been a crusader in Congress, fighting to reform America’s drug laws, fighting against mandatory minimum sentencing, fighting against solitary confinement for juveniles and for increased educational opportunities for incarcerated people just to name a few things. Senator, you’ve said before that change doesn’t come from Washington and it doesn’t come from Trenton. You’ve said that change comes from communities like these. I wanted to ask you, what do you hope to accomplish in tonight’s forum?
Booker: Well, we want to make people aware that this is not a left or right issue, Republican or Democrat. This is really an American movement that’s beginning to happen where Libertarians, fiscal conservatives, Christian Evangelicals as well as civil Libertarians, liberals, progressives are all beginning to see that it makes no sense that we’re the country with 5 percent of the global population but we have 25 percent — one out of every four — people on the planet Earth are in America. It costs us so much money. We’re incarcerating addicted people, not treating them, incarcerating mental ill people, not getting them health care. We’re making a tremendous mistake in what we’re doing, but the good thing that’s happening is states are beginning to say, wait a minute, if we do the right thing by folks we can lower the prison population and lower crime at the same time and elevate human potential. So I’m really excited. Forums like this help to get people to understand what’s happening within our system, where it’s broken. But more importantly, what we can do to fix it.
Delmore: Now senator, I’ve heard you say over and over that you didn’t go to Washington to be New Jersey’s Democratic senator. You said that you’re there to represent all the people. And I wanted to ask you how you planned to put criminal justice reform on the table in this particularly partisan political environment? Now the Trump administration and the Republican Congress hasn’t put it on their list of priorities. How do you plan to do so?
Booker: Well, you know, a lot of people said we couldn’t have gotten as far as we’ve gotten so far, we couldn’t get there. When I first came to Washington, Chuck Grassley was speaking out against our efforts to reform. Now he’s joined with us to write a bipartisan bill that the chairman of the Judiciary Committee in this Congress. So we actually got a bipartisan bill out of committee. It hasn’t been put on the Senate floor and it’s frustrating to me. And we’re about to end this Congress and have to start all over again, but it’s really promising when you have the Koch brothers supporting this, Newt Gingrich, a guy named Grover Norquist, a lot of very well-known Republicans are really out saying wait, this system is just not fair, it doesn’t treat all people equally and it really actually is causing problems like violence and poverty that we are really trying to solve. So we’ve got momentum, we’ve got very big name people on both sides of the aisle and the more grassroots awareness we have, the more we can engage, the more likely representatives are going to listen to them.
Delmore: Now I want to pick up on something you just said. Equal justice for all. That’s one of the values that American society and American government was founded on, but people have argued that there’s a perception and in a lot of instances it’s a demonstrated reality that equal justice is not being applied to people, especially poor citizens and communities of color. How do you work to bridge that gap and how do you work to regain trust in those communities?
Booker: Well, you know, it’s been very frustrating. And I’m a guy, I’m a Jersey boy through and through, but I’ve lived about half my life in Bergen County, Harrington Park, N.J., half my life in Newark, N.J. and you can just see the differences. I always tell people at Stanford, I saw a lot of people using drugs but there was no stopping and frisk on the way home from frat parties. There’s no difference in America between blacks and whites, rich and poor for using drugs or even selling drugs, but unfortunately, the drug war has been persecuted more on the vulnerable populations, poor people in particular, disproportionately people of color. In fact, if you’re African-American in this country, you’re about four times more likely to be arrested for drugs or drug selling even though there’s no difference between black and white drug use. So what people have to understand is that this doesn’t hurt minority populations or poor populations, it actually hurts us all. If people knew in New Jersey that we’re not spending the money to fix our roads, our bridges or our tunnels but we in the United States, we’re building a new prison every 10 days from the time I was in law school and the time I was the mayor of Newark, pouring trillions of dollars into building out the prison infrastructure, but not the kinds of things that grow jobs and create opportunity. That’s outrageous. So we’re all in this and we’ve got to find a way to fix this.
Delmore: Now we’ve built out that prison infrastructure to accommodate what you’ve said is a ballooning prison population in this country. You’ve talked about reform that upholds public safety and is, at the same time, fiscally responsible. Quickly, what does that look like?
Booker: Well it really looks like I think what we’re starting to see. Experiments around the country where people are going to say, hey wait a minute, if we take a kid that got caught up on heroin or prescription pills and has an addiction, we can’t jail our way out of the problem. It means getting that person the help that they need. Sure, you break a law you should be responsible, but sentences should be proportionate. We have people serving decades in prison or I always say we have people in prison for years for doing things the last two presidents have admitted to doing. So it means making punishments proportional, it means getting people the health care or the drug treatment that they need. It means empowering people when they’re coming out. I as a taxpayer now know if you provide education for somebody in prison, for every dollar you spend on prison education, you actually save about $4 or $5 in terms of later taxpayer dollars because people who get educated in prison don’t tend to come back at the same rates than others that don’t.
Delmore: And this is a conversation I look forward to continuing tonight. Sen. Cory Booker, thank you so much for joining me.
Watch the live stream of the criminal justice forum.