The Senate took a step forward today to make our justice system fairer and more just

Earlier this month, I was proud to join a bipartisan group of Senate Democrats and Republicans to introduce the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015, legislation that finally takes steps forward to reform America’s broken criminal justice system. I’m honored that provisions I recommended and fought for were included in the bill’s final text.

The bill is the result of months of negotiations, and finally takes meaningful steps forward to fix our backwards justice system. Among other critical provisions, our bill includes critical sentencing reforms to help make federal sentencing laws fairer and more just and important provisions that limit juvenile solitary confinement and allow juveniles to obtain sealing or expungement of their convictions under certain circumstances.

The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act moved a step closer to law today when the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to approve the bill. Earlier this week, the Judiciary Committee held an informational hearing on the bill, and I’m sharing some excerpts of my testimony to that hearing below:

I extend my gratitude to all the Senators who have cosponsored this bill: Chairman Grassley, Ranking Member Leahy, Senators Durbin, Schumer, Lee, Cornyn, Whitehouse, Graham, Scott, Coons, and Tillis. This historic reform bill was the result of months of hard work and thoughtful deliberation by a bipartisan group of senators on this Committee and their staffs. I acknowledge Chairman Grassley and Senator Durbin for leading these efforts, and I thank Chairman Grassley for promptly scheduling this hearing.

I thank my colleagues for their tireless work on this bill thus far. At times negotiations were difficult and slow moving, yet talks continued on and a middle ground was found that each side of the debate could agree on. This is how the American public expects Congress to function and I applaud this group for working together.

This is a historic moment for our country. Countless Americans have suffered the injustices of our broken criminal justice system. We have a chance to finally take a step in the right direction and fulfill the promise of our founding fathers and become a nation of liberty and justice for all.

Our Nation celebrates these ideals, yet our justice system too often falls short. It is disconcerting that we lead the world as the country that incarcerates the highest number of its own citizens. It is troubling that, when it comes to imprisoning our own people, we surpass every other country, including China and Russia. And it is shameful that Americans of color disproportionately suffer in our justice system.

Our nation will not reach its full potential without fixing mass incarceration. We have five percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of its prison population. Since 1980, the federal prison population has exploded by nearly 800 percent. This increase is no accident. It can be directly traced to the failed War on Drugs. According to the Urban Institute, the single largest contributing factor in the growth of the federal prison population is the length of drug sentences. In fact, there are more people in jails and prisons today for drug offenses than there were incarcerated for any reason at all in 1980.

Mandatory minimum drug sentences have exploded the federal prison population. Drug offenders are the largest group of federal offenders sentenced each year. In fiscal year 2013, 60 percent of drug offenders were convicted under mandatory minimum penalties.

Some feel the brunt of mandatory minimum penalties more than others. Blacks are 13 percent of the U.S. population, but represent 28 percent of federal offenders convicted of mandatory minimum penalties, while Latinos constitute 45 percent.

Congress passed mandatory minimum penalties to target drug kingpins. But the people most often subject to such penalties are low-level street dealers.

The sad reality is formerly incarcerated people are never truly free.

Once released from prison, they are often denied the right to vote, go back to school, or get a job. And thousands of families are denied people they love by an overly punitive system.

Our broken criminal justice system is a huge drain on our resources. The average cost of keeping a federal inmate in prison is $29,000 a year. Over 25 percent of the Department of Justice’s budget goes towards the Bureau of Prisons. The bureau’s budget is now $6.9 billion dollars — almost double what it was in 2000.

Our broken criminal justice system harms our children and families. Over 2.7 million children have an incarcerated parent in the United States. Moreover, approximately 10 million children have experienced parental incarceration at some point in their lives. Tearing families apart does nothing to move our country forward or keep our communities safe.

The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act would take a big step towards fixing this national problem. I want to highlight just a few critical provisions of this legislation.

The bill strikes the right balance between fairness and public safety. It reduces certain mandatory penalties that apply to repeat drug offenders and eliminates the three-strike mandatory life provision. But it allows those enhanced penalties to be applied to offenders with prior convictions for serious violent and serious drug felonies.

The bill would expand the existing safety valve to allow more nonviolent, low-level, offenders to avoid harsh mandatory minimums. It also creates a second safety valve that gives judges the discretion to sentence certain low-level offenders below the 10-year mandatory minimum.

Judges are the true sentencing experts — not politicians in Washington — and we need to give them the proper discretion to hand out fair sentences.

The bill would make the Fair Sentencing Act retroactive, which would allow those sentenced under the old crack cocaine regime to receive fairer sentences. The Fair Sentencing Act reduced the sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1. While many Americans benefited and continue to benefit from that bill, too many sentenced before that legislation became law were unaffected. This bill would correct that injustice.

The bill would allow federal inmates to participate in recidivism reduction programming and gain access to earned time credit. These reforms are critical in decreasing our current federal prison population and also providing inmates programming that will make them less likely to commit another crime once they are released.

I am pleased to see that a juvenile solitary confinement ban was added to the legislation, a practice widely criticized as detrimental to the mental and physical health of young detainees. This bill would ban the practice of solitary confinement for children for any reason other than as a temporary response to behavior that poses a serious and immediate risk of physical harm to the juvenile or others at the correctional facility. Though there may not be many juveniles in the federal system, but we cannot forget about these young Americans. And the federal government can be a leader on this issue for the states to follow.

Currently, there is no broad federal statute that allows for the sealing of adult criminal records. This bill would enable those convicted of nonviolent crimes to petition for the sealing of their criminal records, making it more likely that they will be able to obtain a job and reintegrate into society. Petitioners who have successfully sealed their records may lawfully claim that their records do not exist, with certain commonsense exceptions for prosecutors and law enforcement to access those records.

We must re-dedicate ourselves to the unfinished business of civil rights in America. And we must start by reforming our troubled criminal justice system on the federal level, which has trapped so many poor people and people of color in its web. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.” His inspirational call to action reminds us that our Union has come a long way, but we still have a distance to travel. Now is not the time for apathy. Now is not the time for complacency. Now is not the time for excuses.

Let’s answer the call. Let’s do our part. Let’s make our justice system fairer and more just. Let’s pass the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act. I urge my fellow senators on this Committee to support this legislation and vote to report it out of Committee. And I urge all of my colleagues in both chambers of Congress to promptly pass this bill, so that the president may sign it into law this year.