Hillary Clinton Addresses Criminal Justice System Reform at Columbia
Hillary spoke at the David N. Dinkins Leadership and Public Policy
Forum at Columbia University this morning and laid out a reform plan
for the criminal justice system.
Hillary Clinton: It's time to end the era of mass incarceration
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
In
her keynote speech at the David N. Dinkins Leadership & Public
Policy Forum, Hillary called for an end to the era of mass
incarceration, and made a call to action to reform our criminal justice
system.
Thank you so much. I am absolutely delighted to be
back here at Columbia. I want to thank President Bollinger, Dean Janow,
and everyone at the School of International and Public Affairs. It is a
special treat to be here with and on behalf of a great leader of this
city and our country, David Dinkins. He has made such an indelible
impact on New York, and I had the great privilege of working with him as
First Lady and then, of course, as a new senator.
When I was just
starting out as a senator, David’s door was always open. He and his
wonderful wife Joyce were great friends and supporters and good sounding
boards about ideas that we wanted to consider to enhance the quality of
life and the opportunities for the people of this city. I was pleased
to address the Dinkins Leadership and Public Policy Forum in my first
year as a senator, and I so appreciated then as I have in the years
since David’s generosity with his time and most of all his wisdom. So 14
years later, I’m honored to have this chance, once again, to help
celebrate the legacy of one of New York’s greatest public servants.
I’m
pleased too that you will have the opportunity after my remarks to hear
from such a distinguished panel, to go into more detail about some of
the issues that we face. I also know that Manhattan Borough President
Gale Brewer is here, along with other local and community leaders.
Because
surely this is a time when our collective efforts to devise approaches
to the problems that still afflict us is more important than ever.
Indeed, it is a time for wisdom.
For yet again, the family of a young black man is grieving a life cut short.
Yet again, the streets of an American city are marred by violence. By shattered glass and shouts of anger and shows of force.
Yet again a community is reeling, its fault lines laid bare and its bonds of trust and respect frayed.
Yet again, brave police officers have been attacked in the line of duty.
What we’ve seen in Baltimore should, indeed does, tear at our soul.
And, from Ferguson to Staten Island to Baltimore, the patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable.
Walter
Scott shot in the back in Charleston, South Carolina. Unarmed. In debt.
And terrified of spending more time in jail for child support payments
he couldn’t afford.
Tamir Rice shot in a park in Cleveland, Ohio. Unarmed and just 12 years old.
Eric Garner choked to death after being stopped for selling cigarettes on the streets of this city.
And now Freddie Gray. His spine nearly severed while in police custody.
Not
only as a mother and a grandmother but as a citizen, a human being, my
heart breaks for these young men and their families.
We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.
There
is something profoundly wrong when African American men are still far
more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes,
and sentenced to longer prison terms than are meted out to their white
counterparts.
There is something wrong when a third of all black
men face the prospect of prison during their lifetimes. And an estimated
1.5 million black men are “missing” from their families and communities
because of incarceration and premature death.
There is something wrong when more than one out of every three young black men in Baltimore can’t find a job.
There
is something wrong when trust between law enforcement and the
communities they serve breaks down as far as it has in many of our
communities.
We have allowed our criminal justice system to get
out of balance. And these recent tragedies should galvanize us to come
together as a nation to find our balance again.
We should begin by
heeding the pleas of Freddie Gray’s family for peace and unity, echoing
the families of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and others in the past
years.
Those who are instigating further violence in Baltimore
are disrespecting the Gray family and the entire community. They are
compounding the tragedy of Freddie Gray’s death and setting back the
cause of justice. So the violence has to stop.
But more broadly, let’s remember that everyone in every community benefits when there is respect for the law and when everyone in every community is respected by the law. That is what we have to work towards in Baltimore and across our country.
We
must urgently begin to rebuild the bonds of trust and respect among
Americans. Between police and citizens, yes, but also across society.
Restoring
trust in our politics, our press, our markets. Between and among
neighbors and even people with whom we disagree politically.
This is so fundamental to who we are as a nation and everything we want to achieve together.
It
truly is about how we treat each other and what we value. Making it
possible for every American to reach his or her God-given
potential—regardless of who you are, where you were born, or who you
love.
The inequities that persist in our justice system undermine this shared vision of what America can be and should be.
I
learned this firsthand as a young attorney just out of law school—at
one of those law schools that will remain nameless here at Columbia. One
of my earliest jobs for the Children’s Defense Fund, which David had
mentioned—I was so fortunate to work with Marian Wright Edelman as a
young lawyer and then serving on the board of the Children’s Defense
Fund—was studying the problem then of youth, teenagers, sometimes
preteens, incarcerated in adult jails. Then, as director of the
University of Arkansas School of Law’s legal aid clinic, I advocated on
behalf of prison inmates and poor families.
I saw repeatedly how
our legal system can be and all too often is stacked against those who
have the least power, who are the most vulnerable.
I saw how
families could be and were torn apart by excessive incarceration. I saw
the toll on children growing up in homes shattered by poverty and
prison.
So, unfortunately, I know these are not new challenges by any means.
In
fact they have become even more complex and urgent over time. And today
they demand fresh thinking and bold action from all of us.
Today
there seems to be a growing bipartisan movement for commonsense reforms
in our criminal justice systems. Senators as disparate on the political
spectrum as Cory Booker and Rand Paul and Dick Durbin and Mike Lee are
reaching across the aisle to find ways to work together. It is rare to
see Democrats and Republicans agree on anything today. But we’re
beginning to agreeing on this: We need to restore balance to our
criminal justice system.
Now of course it is not enough just to agree and give speeches about it—we actually have to work together to get the job done.
We
need to deliver real reforms that can be felt on our streets, in our
courthouses, and our jails and prisons, in communities too long
neglected.
Let me touch on two areas in particular where I believe we need to push for more progress.
First,
we need smart strategies to fight crime that help restore trust between
law enforcement and our communities, especially communities of color.
There’s
a lot of good work to build on. Across the country, there are so many
police officers out there every day inspiring trust and confidence,
honorably doing their duty, putting themselves on the line to save
lives. There are police departments already deploying creative and
effective strategies, demonstrating how we can protect the public
without resorting to unnecessary force. We need to learn from those
examples, build on what works.
We can start by making sure that
federal funds for state and local law enforcement are used to bolster
best practices, rather than to buy weapons of war that have no place on
our streets.
President Obama’s task force on policing gives us a
good place to start. Its recommendations offer a roadmap for reform,
from training to technology, guided by more and better data.
We
should make sure every police department in the country has body cameras
to record interactions between officers on patrol and suspects.
That
will improve transparency and accountability, it will help protect good
people on both sides of the lens. For every tragedy caught on tape,
there surely have been many more that remained invisible. Not every
problem can be or will be prevented with cameras, but this is a
commonsense step we should take.
The President has provided the
idea of matching funds to state and local governments investing in body
cameras. We should go even further and make this the norm everywhere.
And
we should listen to law enforcement leaders who are calling for a
renewed focus on working with communities to prevent crime, rather than
measuring success just by the number of arrests or convictions.
As
your Senator from New York, I supported a greater emphasis on community
policing, along with putting more officers on the street to get to know
those communities.
David Dinkins was an early pioneer of this
policy. His leadership helped lay the foundation for dramatic drops in
crime in the years that followed.
And today smart policing in communities that builds relationships, partnerships, and trust makes more sense than ever.
And
it shouldn’t be limited just to officers on the beat. It’s an ethic
that should extend throughout our criminal justice system. To
prosecutors and parole officers. To judges and lawmakers.
We all share a responsibility to help re-stitch the fabric of our neighborhoods and communities.
We
also have to be honest about the gaps that exist across our country,
the inequality that stalks our streets. Because you cannot talk about
smart policing and reforming the criminal justice system if you also
don’t talk about what’s needed to provide economic opportunity, better
educational chances for young people, more support to families so they
can do the best jobs they are capable of doing to help support their own
children.
Today I saw an article
on the front page of USA Today that really struck me, written by a
journalist who lives in Baltimore. And here’s what I read three times to
make sure I was reading correctly: "At a conference in 2013 at Johns
Hopkins University, Vice Provost Jonathan Bagger pointed out that 'only
six miles separate the Baltimore neighborhoods of Roland Park and
Hollins Market. But there is a 20-year difference in the average life
expectancy.'"
We have learned in the last few years that life
expectancy, which is a measure of the quality of life in communities and
countries, manifests the same inequality that we see in so many other
parts of our society.
Women—white women without high school
education—are losing life expectancy. Black men and black women are
seeing their life expectancy goes down in so many parts of our country.
This
may not grab headlines, although I was glad to see it on the front page
of USA Today. But it tells us more than I think we can bear about what
we are up against.
We need to start understanding how important it is to care for every single child as though that child were our own.
David
and I started our conversation this morning talking about our
grandchildren; now his are considerably older than mine. But it was not
just two longtime friends catching up with each other. It was so clearly
sharing what is most important to us, as it is to families everywhere
in our country.
So I don’t want the discussion about criminal
justice, smart policing, to be siloed and to permit discussions and
arguments and debates about it to only talk about that. The conversation
needs to be much broader. Because that is a symptom, not a cause, of
what ails us today.
The second area where we need to chart a new course is how we approach punishment and prison.
It’s
a stark fact that the United States has less than 5 percent of the
world’s population, yet we have almost 25 percent of the world’s total
prison population. The numbers today are much higher than they were 30,
40 years ago, despite the fact that crime is at historic lows.
Of
the more than 2 million Americans incarcerated today, a significant
percentage are low-level offenders: people held for violating parole or
minor drug crimes, or who are simply awaiting trial in backlogged
courts.
Keeping them behind bars does little to reduce crime. But it is does a lot to tear apart families and communities.
One in every 28 children now has a parent in prison. Think about what that means for those children.
When
we talk about one and a half million missing African American men,
we’re talking about missing husbands, missing fathers, missing brothers.
They’re not there to look after their children or bring home a paycheck. And the consequences are profound.
Without the mass incarceration that we currently practice, millions fewer people would be living in poverty.
And
it’s not just families trying to stay afloat with one parent behind
bars. Of the 600,000 prisoners who reenter society each year, roughly 60
percent face long-term unemployment.
And for all this, taxpayers are paying about $80 billion a year to keep so many people in prison.
The
price of incarcerating a single inmate is often more than $30,000 per
year—and up to $60,000 in some states. That’s the salary of a teacher or
police officer.
One year in a New Jersey state prison costs $44,000—more than the annual tuition at Princeton.
If
the United States brought our correctional expenditures back in line
with where they were several decades ago, we’d save an estimated $28
billion a year. And I believe we would not be less safe. You can pay a
lot of police officers and nurses and others with $28 billion to help us
deal with the pipeline issues.
It’s time to change our approach.
It’s time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national
debate about how to reduce our prison population while keeping our
communities safe.
I don’t know all the answers. That’s why I’m
here—to ask all the smart people in Columbia and New York to start
thinking this through with me. I know we should work together to pursue
together to pursue alternative punishments for low-level offenders. They
do have to be in some way registered in the criminal justice system,
but we don’t want that to be a fast track to long-term criminal
activity, we don’t want to create another “incarceration generation.”
I’ve
been encouraged to see changes that I supported as Senator to reduce
the unjust federal sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine
crimes finally become law.
And last year, the Sentencing Commission reduced recommended prison terms for some drug crimes.
President
Obama and former Attorney General Holder have led the way with
important additional steps. And I am looking forward to our new Attorney
General, Loretta Lynch, carrying this work forward.
There are
other measures that I and so many others have championed to reform
arbitrary mandatory minimum sentences are long overdue.
We also
need probation and drug diversion programs to deal swiftly with
violations, while allowing low-level offenders who stay clean and stay
out of trouble to stay out of prison. I’ve seen the positive effects of
specialized drug courts and juvenile programs work to the betterment of
individuals and communities. And please, please, let us put mental
health back at the top of our national agenda.
You and I know
that the promise of de-institutionalizing those in mental health
facilities was supposed to be followed by the creation of
community-based treatment centers. Well, we got half of that
equation—but not the other half. Our prisons and our jails are now our
mental health institutions.
I have to tell you I was somewhat
surprised in both Iowa and New Hampshire to be asked so many questions
about mental health. “What are we going to do with people who need help
for substance abuse or mental illness?” “What are we going to do when
the remaining facilities are being shut down for budget reasons?” “What
are we going to do when hospitals don’t really get reimbursed for
providing the kind of emergency care that is needed for mental health
patients?”
It’s not just a problem in our cities. There’s a quiet
epidemic of substance abuse sweeping small-town and rural America as
well. We have to do more and finally get serious about treatment.
I’ll
be talking about all of this in the months to come, offering new
solutions to protect and strengthen our families and communities.
I
know in a time when we’re afflicted by short-termism, we’re not looking
over the horizon for the investments that we need to make in our fellow
citizens, in our children. So I’m well aware that progress will not be
easy, despite the emerging bipartisan consensus for certain reforms. And
that we will have to overcome deep divisions and try to begin to
replenish our depleted reservoirs of trust.
But I am convinced, as
the congenital optimist I must be to live my life, that we can rise to
this challenge. We can heal our wounds. We can restore balance to our
justice system and respect in our communities. And we can make sure that
we take actions that are going to make a difference in the lives of
those who for too long have been marginalized and forgotten.
Let’s
protect the rights of all our people. Let’s take on the broader
inequities in our society. We can’t separate out the unrest we see in
the streets from the cycles of poverty and despair that hollow out those
neighborhoods.
Despite all the progress we’ve made in this
country lifting people up—and it has been extraordinary—too many of our
fellow citizens are still left out.
Twenty-five years ago, in his
inaugural address as Mayor, David Dinkins warned of leaving “too many
lost amidst the wealth and grandeur that surrounds us.”
Today, his
words and the emotion behind them ring truer than ever. You don’t have
to look too far from this magnificent hall to find children still living
in poverty or trapped in failing schools. Families who work hard but
can’t afford the rising prices in their neighborhood.
Mothers and fathers who fear for their sons’ safety when they go off to school—or just to go buy a pack of Skittles.
These challenges are all woven together. And they all must be tackled together.
Our goal must truly be inclusive and lasting prosperity that’s measured by how many families get ahead and stay ahead…
How many children climb out of poverty and stay out of prison…
How many young people can go to college without breaking the bank…
How many new immigrants can start small businesses …
How many parents can get good jobs that allow them to balance the demands of work and family.
That’s
how we should measure prosperity. With all due respect, that is a far
better measurement than the size of the bonuses handed out in downtown
office buildings.
Now even in the most painful times like those we are seeing in Baltimore …
When parents fear for their children…
When smoke fills the skies above our cities…
When police officers are assaulted…
Even
then—especially then—let’s remember the aspirations and values that
unite us all: That every person should have the opportunity to succeed.
That no one is disposable. That every life matters.
So yes, Mayor Dinkins. This is a time for wisdom.
A time for honesty about race and justice in America.
And, yes, a time for reform.
David
Dinkins is a leader we can look to. We know what he stood for. Let us
take the challenge and example he presents and think about what we must
do to make sure that this country we love—this city we live in—are both
good and great.
And please join me in saying a prayer for the
family of Freddie Gray, and all the men whose names we know and those we
don’t who have lost their lives unnecessarily and tragically. And in
particular today, include in that prayer the people of Baltimore and our
beloved country.
