United, by Cory Booker: on Crime

Prison construction draws resources from other priorities

• The federal incarceration rate has increased 800% and state incarceration rates have increased 500% since 1980.
• Our nation is now the undisputed incarceration capital of the world. America has roughly 5% of the globe's population but about 25%--one out of every four--of the imprisoned people on the planet.
• Roughly 1/3 of all adult Americans have an arrest record.

In the years between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened EVERY TEN DAYS. The astonishing rate of construction draws precious public resources away from other priorities. At the same time, America--which once had the top-ranked infrastructure, from roads to bridges to airports, seaports, and electrical grids--has slipped to 12th place.

1960s cities had mostly white cops & mostly black majority

Overt racism pervaded the city in the 1960s. Though blacks and Latinos accounted for the majority of the population, they had almost no meaningful political representation. What's more, mostly white officers policed predominantly black sections of the city, like the Central Ward. There were widespread reports of police brutality, and tensions built up around the all- too- common experiences of black youth who were stopped and harassed by the police.

Anti-recidivism funds much scanter than prison funds

If you go to prison for a nonviolent crime, you will return to society as part of a growing group of second-class citizens--often denied basic citizenship rights such as being able to vote or serve on a jury. If you have a felony conviction, your face often overwhelming obstacles to getting a job, obtaining housing.

Over the years, our initiatives helped keep thousands of Newarkers from recidivating--and they cost a fraction of what taxpayers would have spent rearresting, retrying, and reimprisoning these people. The irony remains that money for efforts to put and keep people in jail and prison is far easier to come by than the scant funds we cobbled together to run these fledgling programs. I always had the feeling that although we were making an important difference, we were not fixing the system.

Police doesn't solve problem; they just attend to symptoms

In Newark, a meeting took place at the FBI's Newark field office. As they rolled through the data on violent crime in and around the city, I said to the then special agent in charge, Les Weiser, "How do we solve this problem?"

Agent Weiser looked at me. "Mayor," he said, "we DON'T solve this problem. We just attend to the symptoms of the problem." I knew that by "we" he wasn't just talking about the FBI; he was talking about law enforcement.

Reduced crime by helping prisoners coming home

Theory of "broken windows" doesn't drive down crime

Decades after these practices were documented, judicially upheld and implemented across our nation, the DOJ alleged that our use of stop-and-frisk and quality-of-life summonses were not helping us drive down crime and that these tactics actually undermined residents' quality of life.

Poor & minorities bear the brunt of policing practices

Mass incarceration has failed

I am also growing more hopeful about issues of race and the criminal justice system. We can't achieve our ideals of safety and security in our country without confronting the persistent realities of race in our criminal justice system. When it comes to policing, the attention being paid to videos of minorities being treated badly by police is good--if we learn from them.

Parks and green spaces are associated with safer communities

Activists and leaders educated me on the [environmental] benefits trees provide, and soon we set out to find every way possible to plant more of them. But when my staff told me that tree planting could actually help in our efforts to reduce crime, at first I didn't believe them. So they provided the data: evidence from studies that there may in fact be a causal link between more trees and less crime and violence. In fact, beyond trees on the street, parks and green spaces all were associated with safer communities.