Cory Booker: “I rise today in partnership with Senator Thad Cochran from Mississippi having just submitted a resolution recognizing…”

“I rise today in partnership with Senator Thad Cochran from Mississippi having just submitted a resolution recognizing and celebrating Black History Month here in the United States of America. I wish to take a few moments before that to address an issue that very poignantly has been anguishing my heart for my entire life. From the time I was growing up in the small town of Harrington Park, NJ, through my career in school and college, this has been grieving my heart. It has been grieving my heart since I started working in a predominantly minority city--a city I love--Newark, NJ. I bring this up in the context of a previous speech I gave about our broken criminal justice system that makes us singular, among all of humanity on planet Earth, for the amount of our population that we incarcerate. We have 5 percent of the globe's population but about 25 percent of all of the globe's imprisoned people. This explosion is not consistent with our history. In fact, it is inconsistent with our history. It is incongruent with our values. To be very specific, the explosion of our prison population is because of the war on drugs. The bottom line is that there were fewer people incarcerated in 1980 for any reason than there are today in prison and jails for drug offenses alone. Let me say that again, we have more people incarcerated today, either in prisons or in jails, just for drug crimes than all of the people incarcerated in the year 1980.…”