Cory Booker on how America's criminal justice system destroys the American dream

German Lopez:You've called the war on drugs a failure. What did you mean by that?

But we've compromised those values severely during this so-called drug war — so severely that we're actually inhibiting public safety. We're consuming gross amounts of taxpayer dollars. We are undermining human potential. And we're doing it all in a way that has a significant, if not savage, disparate impact on poor people and minorities.

That, to me, is a failure. When we can get the same aims but also save taxpayer dollars, create greater safety than we're experiencing right now, elevate human life and human potential, and not further cement racial disparities in this country but alleviate them, then we should be going in a dramatically different direction with drug policy reform. Pilot programs for prison reentry, and entire states like Georgia — which is dramatically lowering its African-American prison population, saving taxpayer dollars, and driving down crime — are showing us that we could go a different way.

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What I'm comfortable doing now is just saying, "Hey, federal government, play catch-up here. Get into the zone we already know most Americans are comfortable in." And we're going to stop criminalizing large segments of the country, we're going to allow scientists to study it, and we're not going to take law-abiding citizens who sell marijuana through dispensaries in the states that have legalized it and make criminals out of them.

You have drug laws that are so severely, disparately enforced against some groups. Let's take African Americans, for example: there's no difference between black and white marijuana usage or sales, in fact. You go to college campuses and you'll get white drug dealers. I know this from my own experience of growing up and going to college myself. Fraternity houses are not being raided by police at the level you see with communities in inner cities.

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So equal usage of this drug, equal sale of this drug, but blacks are about 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for it. African Americans are more likely to get mandatory minimums, more likely to get about 13 percent longer sentences. It's created these jagged disparities in incarceration. In my state, blacks are about 13 to 14 percent of the population, but they make up over 60 percent of the prison population.

Remember: the majority of people we arrest in America are nonviolent offenders. Now you've got this disparity in arrests, but that creates disparities that painfully fall all along this system.

For example, when you get arrested for possession with intent to sell, you can do it in some neighborhoods where there are no public schools and it's not as densely packed as an inner city. You do it in an inner city and now you're within a school zone, so you're facing even higher mandatory minimums. So when you face that and you get out from your longer term, now you're 19 years old with a felony conviction, possession with intent to sell in a school zone.

But forget even all of that — if you just have a felony conviction for possession, what do you face now? Thousands of collateral consequences that will dog you for all of your life. You can't get a Pell Grant. You can't get a business license. You can't get a job. You're hungry? You can't get food stamps. You need some place to live? You can't even get public housing.

What that does within our country, especially in these concentrated areas where we have massive numbers of men being incarcerated, is create a caste system in which people feel like there's no way out. And we're not doing anything as a society like we know we could do. There are tons of pilot programs that show if you help people coming back from a nonviolent offense lock into a job or opportunity, their recidivism rates go down dramatically. If you don't help them, what happens is that, left with limited options, many people make the decision to go back to that world of narcotic sales.

What's more dangerous to society: someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of their own home, or someone going 30 miles over the speed limit, racing down a road in a community? And yet that teenager who makes a mistake — doing something the last three presidents admitted to doing — now he has a felony conviction, because it's more likely he's going to get caught. And for the rest of his life, when he's 29, 39, 49, 59, he's still paying for a mistake he made as a teenager.

That's not the kind of society I believe in, nor is it fiscally responsible. It's undermining productivity. It's undermining people's ability to take care of their families. It's locking in generational problems in poverty, or even limiting opportunities.

This is so wrong that those conversations I'm having with conservatives as well as with Democrats are resonating. When you have people like Sen. Rand Paul talking about racial disparities in incarceration, when you have people like Grover Norquist standing up and talking about disparate racial impact of this problem, this convergence in understanding of fiscal conservatives, of Christian conservatives, of libertarians shows me that this is a time of great hope for our country.

So I'm not going to question people's motives. This is one of those issues, like the civil rights movement of the 1960s, where it should pull all Americans together to say enough is enough.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images News)

I went through 15 years of my life where every single day I would encounter good Americans who were being overly punished in a disproportionate way for a nonviolent drug offense, whose lives were being destroyed, who had desperation, desire, hunger just to have a shot at the American dream — yet a nonviolent drug offense was undermining their potential to contribute, to raise their kids, to have a decent life.

That's just wrong. So every day that I'm here, that echoes in my conscience and drives me forward.

Let me even go a step further, because I alluded to this point but didn't make it clear enough: the violence in my community that's driven by men who believe — and I think they're wrong, but this is what they believe — that they have no fair shot in this country; they made a mistake and they've gone into a system that often turns them out worse than they went in, in terms of their proclivity for crime.

When you take juveniles, like we do in this country, and put them in solitary confinement — other nations consider that torture — you hurt them and you scar them through your practices. You expose them for nonviolent crimes to often violent people. You expose them to gang activity.

Then you throw them back on our streets. And you tell them, "We're not going to help you get a job. You want a roof over your head? Forget it. In fact, if we catch you trespassing on public housing authority property, we're going to take action against you. You're going to get a Pell Grant, try to better yourself through education? Sorry, you're banned from getting a Pell Grant."

What do people do when they feel trapped and cornered by society? What I saw in my city was people getting more and more caught up in criminal activity. You can trace it way back to an early youthful offense that resulted not in us helping them, not in us intervening to empower them — but in taking children and abandoning them and saying, "You made this mistake, and we're going to punish you, and, by the way, that punishment is going to continue every day of your life."

Think of the statistic when I was mayor. We found out that the murder victims in our city had an 85 percent chance of having been previously arrested an average of 10 times. Some people might take a statistic like that and say, "Well, it shows these people are whatever." No.

If you want to judge a society, don't judge it by the kid like me who grew up in an affluent neighborhood and was given great schooling. Judge it by how we treat all of our children.

What does it say about a society when a kid makes a mistake, and we don't surround him with opportunities that we know now work? But no, we have this slippery slope of punishing teenagers for nonviolent offenses — things kids in the neighborhood where I grew up, in an affluent town, did a lot. But when these kids get caught, they begin a slippery slope into a system that often closes off their options and points them more toward crime than toward redemption. That's unacceptable to me.

So I've got a lot of missions here — to expand opportunity, empower people with education, make college more affordable — but dear god, I am driven every single day to end this nightmare that has made my nation singular in humanity for having more people behind bars for nonviolent offenses. And in terms of race and class, we now have a country that has more African Americans under criminal supervision than all the slaves in 1850.

This is haunting to me, especially because there's another way. I don't have to invent it; I'm not just asserting it. I know factually there's another way because I know many red states with Republican governors are showing there's a way to dramatically reduce the prison population. The governor of Georgia is bragging about a 20 percent reduction of African Americans in the criminal justice system. There are common-sense things we could be doing that we're not doing because of a lack of urgency — and that's unacceptable to me. I was taught as a kid, as Langston Hughes said so eloquently, "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."

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But I'm the X Generation. We grew up after the Civil Rights Movement. And I know I'm here because of the outrageously righteous impatience of a whole lot of Americans from wildly different backgrounds — from religious folks to nonreligious folks, black folks to white folks, Christian folks to Muslim and Jewish folks, Latino folks, you name it. There was a wild sense of urgency to raise the consciousness of this country until this place couldn't stop the change. I mean, Sen. Strom Thurmond did a 24-hour filibuster trying to stop civil rights legislation. And the pressure in this country to end an outrageous injustice, a savage injustice, led to change.

Joe Posner/Vox

To me, this issue is no less urgent. In fact, in terms of affecting poor people and minorities and devastating communities, this is an urgent issue of that magnitude — to bring a legal system that is truly a justice system.

We're all hurting for it. I don't care what your background is. You're hurting for it. You're hurting because the truth of our country — liberty and justice for all — is not being told. You're hurting for it because you're spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars from your annual taxpayer expenses to support an unjust system. We're hurting for it because there's a better way to go; and not doing anything is making streets less safe, and destroying and undermining our children that we desperately need in a competitive economic environment to be contributing and not costing.

So I don't know what it's going to take, but I know one thing it's going to take is us and more people getting involved and seeing this as a cause for our country, not a cause for some people over there. This really does touch us all, and there's got to be a lot more pushing. You know the old saying — I've heard it a million times down here: "Change doesn't come from Washington; it comes to Washington."

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.