Poor urban blacks had rates of violence similar to poor urban whites.
Now I represent a rural state and have for decades. And I have to tell you that I do not see the level or intensity of policing that we seem to see in so many cities.
Of course, People committing violent crimes need to be caught, tried by a jury of their peers, and if they are convicted they need to go to jail. The vast majority of police officers -- black and white -- are doing the difficult and dangerous work of protecting communities. As a former mayor, I know what a difficult job police officers have. We need police officers to keep our streets safe.
However, we cannot ignore the fact that the majority of people living in our cities are trying to work hard, play by the rules and raise their children. There are neighborhoods where mothers are afraid to let their children outside for fear of gang violence and drugs and we owe it to them to get dangerous people off our streets. But mothers should not be afraid of their children being targeted by the police because of the color of their skin, and they should not be worried that a routine interaction with law enforcement ends in inappropriate force or death.
But of course criminal justice reform goes beyond merely reforming police departments. We have to rethink our entire approach. We cannot jail our way out of health problems like drug addiction or social and economic problems like poverty.
We must end the over incarceration of non-violent young Americans who do not pose a serious threat to our society. African-Americans comprise 14 percent of regular drug users but are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses. From 1980 to 2007, about 1 in 3 adults arrested for drugs was African-American.
How many encounters between young people and the police begin with officers detecting the odor of marijuana? It is an obscenity that we stigmatize so many young Americans with a criminal record for smoking marijuana, but not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy. This must change. It is time to take marijuana off the federal list of controlled substances and let state decide whether they want to go forward with legalization, regulation and taxation without interference from the federal government.
We need to end prisons for profit, which result in an over-incentive to arrest, jail and detain, in order to keep prison beds full. I have introduced legislation to do just that.
We need to invest in drug courts and interventions for people with substance abuse problems, so that they do not end up in prison, they end up in treatment.
We need to address our mental health crisis in the country.
We need to end mandatory minimum sentencing and give judges the discretion to better tailor sentences to the specific facts of a given case.
The federal system of parole needs to be reinstated. For people who are serving long sentences, there needs to be an incentive for people to make different choices, and earn their way to a shorter sentence and a path to a productive life.
For people who have committed crimes that have landed them in jail, there needs to be a path back from prison, including a restoration of full voting rights. There needs to be job training and education. It is far cheaper to send a kid to the best Ivy League school in this country than it is to lock them up for a year. I cannot understand why we do not make the important investments in our incarcerated people so that they do not end up back in jail.
And if we are truly going to move away from over incarceration there are a number of systemic issues that we must address but let me address two here.
The first is the disparity in education for children in poor communities, and poor communities of color in particular. Black children, who make up just 18 percent of preschoolers, to account for 48 percent of all out-of-school suspensions before kindergarten. We are failing our black children before Kindergarten! Black students were expelled at three times the rate of white students. Black girls were suspended at higher rates than all other girls and most boys. According to the Department of Education, African-American students are more likely to suffer harsh punishments -- suspensions and arrests -- at school.
We must address the lingering unjust stereotypes that lead us to label black youths as "thugs" and "super-predators." We must get into our schools and keep kids in school. We must ensure that children graduate from high school and don't drop out.
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