On the recordMarch 17, 2015
I appreciate that question. This is one of the reasons I am so passionate about the legislation originally introduced by Senator Lee and the Senator from Illinois, because the mandatory minimums are patently unfair to people all across America. Whether one is White or Black, to have a disproportionate sentence unnecessary to punish a person and prevent a person from doing a future nonviolent crime is bad enough, but when we are talking about, as the Senator from Illinois was before, so negatively concentrated in certain urban areas, it creates an invasive belief that begins to undermine faith in our criminal justice system alone. As we said earlier, the overwhelming majority of drug users and sellers are White, but the overwhelming number of people incarcerated and arrested for it are Black, as well as those receiving mandatory minimums. But what people have to understand is that this has a punishing effect on us all. No. 1, it is hurting families. A friend of mine brought to my attention a ``Sesame Street'' clip where even the educators in public broadcasting are seeing that certain communities have so many of their men--nonviolent offenders--being sucked into the prison system for these long sentences that we have created a generation of children growing up without their parents. That has a difficult impact when it comes to the poverty of that family, when it comes to the challenges of having a provider pull away.…
