Recently, Sen. Booker wrote an op-ed published by the Huffington Post, in which he noted the many injustices endemic to today's criminal justice system, and stressed the dire need for broad-based reform.
Our Criminal-Legal System: Justice Doesn't Have to Be Missing from Equation
By Cory Booker
April 15, 2015
The facts about the criminal-legal system in America are sobering: The United States accounts for only 5 percent of the globe's population, but for 25 percent of the world's prison population.
We lead the world not in science and math education, college graduation or childhood health -- but in the total number of people we incarcerate. We imprison more people than China, Russia, and India.
The United States not only has the highest incarceration rate in the world, but our prison populations are disproportionately comprised of Americans of color.
Despite African Americans and Latinos committing drug offenses at a rate no different than whites, African Americans are incarcerated at a rate six times greater than whites, and Latinos are incarcerated at nearly twice the rate of whites for the same offenses.
In my home state of New Jersey, African Americans comprise 13.7 percent of the total population, but 62 percent of the state's prison population.
In the United States, African Americans are far more likely to be arrested for selling or possessing drugs, even though studies have shown that African Americans and whites use drugs at the same rate, and whites are actually more likely to sell drugs.
Similarly, Latinos and whites use drugs at equal rates proportionate to their populations, but Latinos are twice as likely as whites to be admitted to state prison for drug use.
Even once released from prison, formerly incarcerated people are often denied the right to vote, to go back to school, and to get a job.
Justice appears to have gone missing from the equation.
But, it doesn't have to be.