Sen. Cory Booker: ‘There are two different criminal justice systems’
Sen. Cory Booker joined Yahoo News and Finance Anchor Bianna Golodryga to discuss his new book, “United,” and, as “Yahoo News Live” marks Black History Month every Friday, the need for criminal justice reform and the impact it would have on the African-American community.
In “United,” the New Jersey senator describes his late father, Cary Booker, telling him, “Son, I worry that a boy growing up like I did — poor, black, to a single mother in a segregated town — would have a better chance of making it in America if he was born in 1936 rather than being born today.” Booker told Golodryga those comments were “a punch in the gut and a condemnation in a sense of this great generation of civil rights activists and leaders and foot soldiers who then handed the torch to the next generation. And what have we done with it?”
Booker said it’s his “determination to fight against this.” He has focused much of his time in the United States Senate on criminal justice reform and has worked across the aisle with Republican senators, including Rand Paul and Mike Lee, to introduce various bills on the issue.
The senator strongly rebuked the current criminal justice system. “Our prison system is full of people who are a testimony to our lack of not just compassion but common sense about what makes us safer, what makes us stronger and what makes us economically more vibrant,” he told Golodryga.
Why? “If you have drug laws that are not equally applied … you could have kids on college campuses who cavalierly use drugs, never worrying about police raiding them or getting stopped and frisked on the way home,” he said.
“The reality is there are two different criminal justice systems,” Booker continued. “If you’re an African-American, you are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than somebody white, even though there’s no difference in drug usage. Latino, twice as much. Then, when you’re arrested in that criminal justice system, blacks will get about a 20 percent longer sentence for the same crime, and then when you come out of that criminal justice system and you find yourself poor, a minority and with a criminal conviction, finding a job, finding housing, all these things become incredibly hard. We wonder why, then, we have a 75 percent recidivism rate.”
He said reforming the criminal justice system would help the entire country, not just the African-American community. “Think about what this does to any American,” Booker told Golodryga, continuing with a threefold argument.
“Our tax dollars are spent in disproportionate way to the rest of the globe,” he said. “We are sinking our tax dollars into a criminal justice system that is so much bigger than [others] any place on the planet Earth. … It’s eating up our dollars.”
He continued: “It’s making us less safe because people who come out of prison and have no hope of getting a job can’t start a business, can’t find someplace to live. They often slip right back into doing those things. As opposed to all the data now shows that if you help people get rapid attachment to work, help people overcome these obstacles, they don’t recidivate so that they don’t create more crime.”
Finally, he said, “It drives poverty, which hurts us all.”
“Now we know there are interventions that prevent people from going to prison, empower people to be successful and make us safer and save taxpayer dollars,” Booker concluded. “That’s why this has become a bipartisan issue.”
Booker also noted why Black History month is so important: “Black History Month is, in my opinion, elevating American history — all of our history.”
