Cory Booker

in the coming days we know that we are going to have an extraordinary visit. This is a historic occasion. We are going to gather both Houses of Congress to hear from Pope Francis. During his time in the United States, Pope Francis has…

The situation facing the tunnels is dire.

I wish to celebrate the remarkable life and accomplishments of a great American and New Jerseyan, Lieutenant Calvin Spann. As a boy in Rutherford, NJ, Calvin was amazed by the miracle of flight, watching as planes took off from nearby…

I wish to introduce the Fair Chance to Compete for Jobs Act of 2015 or the Fair Chance Act. This bipartisan bill has the support of Senators Johnson, Baldwin, Ernst, and Brown, and I thank them for their support. Today, a bipartisan House…

today I am proud to stand here with Senators Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Dick Durbin in introducing the Maintaining dignity and Eliminating unnecessary Restrictive Confinement of Youths Act of 2015, or the MERCY Act. This bipartisan bill…

So, it is clearly time for a change.

I strongly hope that our goal is that they are human repair shops.

It is extraordinary from my hour meeting with Chairman Grassley yesterday to being able to sit with you today.

When we see our infrastructure crumbling in this country, yet we have the resources between 1990 and 2005 to build a new prison in the United States every 10 days, that runs against our fiscal prudence and our values as a Nation.

Senator Johnson is absolutely correct.

if Congress were to act on legislation putting those severe limitations on the practice, that you would agree that is something that is feasible?

We believe that that change in and of itself will lead to about three-quarters of the 10,000, so 7,000 to 8,000 fewer people sitting in jail.

doing it on the Federal level would send a signal to really resonate throughout our country

This is a Compassionate Release Program that is properly named and should be explored.

The vast majority of people who are in prison are coming home from prison.

Your testimony to me right now is that the BOP does not practice solitary confinement of individuals singularly in a confined area.

So, we are taking care of the Californians, but there are a lot of people from the Northeast, a lot of women with small children who are having those connections effectively severed, and that is very problematic.

This is an affront for this Nation, for what we stand for.

To have us, as we claim to be the land of freedom and liberty, but to have one out of every four imprisoned people on the planet Earth here in the United States of America, even though we only have 4 to 5 percent of our population, runs…

So, we have seen as a Nation a dramatic increase in the use and reliance on solitary over the last couple of decades.

To do this at such a massive expense to the taxpayer, unnecessarily egregious expenditures, where we spend about a quarter-of-a-trillion dollars a year incarcerating human beings, many of whom do not need to be incarcerated at the lengths…

That is astonishing to me, and I would love to explore that further, because all the evidence that I have is that it is a practice at the Federal level.

When we see poor people being ground up into a system but for the fact that they do not have the resources for their liberation, that we have modern day debtors' prisons in our country, that runs contrary to our common values.

the only agency that is available in that municipality to address social needs... is the police department.

I do not care if it is a homicide, non-violent drug crime, what are we getting for taxpayers for putting them in an environment in which human rights folks consider that torture.