Full disclosure, I can’t help but crush on the man, sure I
don’t like all his policies, and he is a professional politician, but he saves
dogs, and invites his whole neighborhood to wait out the storm at his place
because he still had power. Who does that? Some part of him has to be awesome and possibly s superhero,
and then drops this proposal on us. Get ready, conservatives get out your
pearls.
So, I opened up Huffington
Post first thing on Wednesday morning and saw, Amanda
Terkel’s piece on Newark Mayor (and Democrat candidate for Senate) Cory
Booker (D) announcement on his plan to reform the criminal justice system. He
promised that if he wins the Senate seat he’d focus on this in October.
An excerpt from Booker’s written announcement:
“One of the biggest wastes of taxpayer dollars in our
society today can be found in a criminal justice system in serious need of
reform. As mayor of Newark, I have watched as my police arrest, re-arrest, and
then re-arrest again, sending the same person for another trip through a
revolving door system that not only largely fails to rehabilitate, but too
often makes reoffending commonplace and most definitely is not helping to make
our communities safer.”
Booker continued to specifically blame mass incarceration as
a waste of taxpayer funds and detrimental to families.
Some of the reforms:
- Develop the national conversation around decriminalizing
marijuana.
- Ends low-level drug offense mandatory minimums.
- Ends the sentencing disparity between crack and powder
cocaine.
- Increase funding for drug and community courts to deal with
low-level offenders instead of sending them to prison.
- Straight-up ends private prisons.
- Facilitate the relationships between inmates and their
families by making calls accessible, providing intimate partner abuse
counseling classes and incarcerate inmates in facilities close to their
families when possible.
- Pass the Voter Empowerment Act of 2013, which would restore
federal voting rights to the formerly incarcerated. (I can’t describe my joy
that this is even on the agenda)
- Provide support for the formerly incarcerated to obtain
employment.
- Increase funding for the DOJ’s Community Oriented Policing
Services, which assisted local law enforcement in community policing.
Booker’s proposal comes from a bipartisan consensus that the
criminal justice system is in need of reform, and criminal justice reform
hasn’t had a champion since Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va) retired. U.S. Attorney General
Eric Holder has called for changes to the judicial system, and he and the Obama
administration have taken aim at the long mandatory prison terms for nonviolent
drug offenders.
Thus, Booker’s proposal isn’t exactly new, but it would be
stepping up the game. However, it looks like Booker is cool with
stop-and-frisk. Booker has worked with the Newark’s ACLU to disclose Newark’s
stop-and-frisk data to the public in monthly incident reports including the
race, gender, and age of everyone stopped, and whether force was used and
arrests made.
Booker’s shortcomings aside, a high profile politician
making criminal justice reform a priority is amazing. Of course, who knows what
committees Booker will get or how influential he’ll be as an incoming Senator.
Still, this is kind of exciting.
