On the recordJuly 10, 2014
I rise to speak about our Nation's broken criminal justice system, a system that has taken an unimaginable and I believe unsustainable toll on our Nation. The United States remarkably is home to between 4 and 5 percent of the entire globe's population, but we have 25 percent of the world's prison population. This phenomenon is unacceptable, that the land of the free would have 25 percent of the globe's imprisoned people. What is startling about that is the majority of those people are nonviolent offenders. In fact, the majority are nonviolent drug offenders. This phenomenon has largely emerged since around 1980, a period during which the Federal prison population has grown nearly tenfold. Since 1980 we have seen a 10-time increase in our prison population. Again, if we were locking up violent offenders, people who are terrorizing our streets or inflicting vicious and violent harm on our communities, then ridding our streets of such dangerous criminals would be understandable and it would be a price worth paying. But that is not the story of this unbelievable explosion of our Federal prisons and our Nation's incarcerated people. The reality is that nearly three-quarters of Federal prisoners are nonviolent and have no history of violence whatsoever.…
