Let's just be honest.
When we look across the street to the Supreme Court and see "Equal Justice Under Law" -- when
you have drug laws that so severely disparate enforced against some groups -- let's pick
African Americans for example -- there's no difference between black and white marijuana
usage or marijuana sales in fact.
But blacks are about 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for it.
African Americans are more likely to get mandatory minimums.
Are more likely -- about 13, get 13% longer sentences.
And it's created these jagged disparities in incarceration.
In my state blacks are about 13 or 14% of the population, they make up over 60% of the
prison population.
And remember, the overwhelming majority of people we arrest in America are non-violent
offenders.
Now you've got this disparity in the arrest, but that creates disparities that painfully
fall along the system.
When you get arrested for possession with intent to sell -- do it in an inner city,
now you're within a school zone -- so now you face even higher mandatory minimums.
Now you're 19 years old, with a felony conviction, possession with intent to sell in a school
zone.
Forget even all that, if you just have a felony conviction for possession, what do you face
now?
Thousands of collateral consequences that will dog you for the rest of your life.
You can't get a pell grant.
You can't get business licenses.
You can't get a job.
You're hungry?
Can't get food stamps.
You need some place to live?
You can't even get public housing.
And what that does is has created within our country, concentrated areas where you have
massive levels of men being incarcerated.
You create a caste system in which feel like there's no way out.
And we're not anything as a society like we know we could do -- because there's tons of
pilot programs that show if you help people when they are coming back from a non-violent
offense, that their recidivism rates go dramatically down.
If you don't help them, what happens is, left with limited options, many people make the
decision to go back into that world of narcotics sales.
What's more dangerous to society?
Somebody smoking marijuana in the privacy of their own home, or somebody going 30 miles
an hour over the speed limit, racing down a road in a community -- what is more dangerous
to society?
But yet that teenager who makes a mistake for doing things the last 3 presidents all
admitted to doing, now they have a felony conviction because it's more likely they're
going to get caught.
And for the rest of their life -- they're 29, 39, 49, 59, they're still paying for a
mistake they made as a teenager.
Now that's not the kind of society that I believe in, nor is it fiscally responsible.
It's undermining their productivity.
Undermining their ability to take care of their family.
This is so wrong that those conversations that I'm having with conservatives as well
as Democrats are resonating.
And so when you have people like Rand Paul standing up and talking about racial disparities
in incarceration, this convergence in understanding -- of fiscal conservatives, of christian conservatives,
of libertarians, shows me that this is a time of great hope for our country.
And so I'm not going to question people's motives.
This is one of those issues like the civil rights movement of the 1960s, where it should
pull all Americans together to say "enough is enough."