Issue Position: Criminal Justice Reform
Issue Position
Our criminal justice system should render justice and protect the public while upholding due process, civil rights and civil liberties, and equal protection under the law.
Yet in the United States today, deep race and class disparities persist in policing, prosecution, and sentencing. Racial profiling, arbitrary detention, brutality, and abuse in detention and incarceration are widespread. We incarcerate tens of thousands guilty of non-violent, victimless crimes, destroying lives and incurring massive costs.
The deck is stacked against defendants who lack money, while those with wealth and connections often secure special treatment or outright impunity.
Our approach to punishment must respect the human dignity of incarcerated people and recognize that except for the most dangerous violent criminals, successful re-entry to society after incarceration is crucial for both the convicted and the public.
Nevertheless, brutal and inhumane conditions prevail in our prisons and jails.
Mandatory minimum sentencing, the drug war, and the misguided use of criminal enforcement as a response to addiction, mental illness, and poverty have contributed to mass incarceration that is a blight on our country.
In the Senate, I will champion and fight tirelessly to pass a New Civil Rights Act that strengthens civil rights laws and advances comprehensive criminal justice reform.
Race and class disparities in policing, prosecution, and sentencing must be ended nationwide.
I will work to reverse the militarization of local police forces, enhance due process and human rights protections for all citizens, ban private prisons, end cash bail, reform prisons and raise conditions of incarceration to humane standards, abolish the death penalty, legalize cannabis, and end incarceration for nonviolent drug offenses.
I'll also support more federal law enforcement resources to attack organized crime, human trafficking, racketeering, money laundering, fraud, espionage, and corruption.
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