Too many African-Americans today, especially in our urban centers, are simultaneously having to deal with the crisis of racial injustice while coping with the effects of poverty and economic deprivation, such as drugs, crime, and despair.
Across the nation, too many African-Americans and other minorities find themselves subjected to a system that treats citizens who have not committed crimes like criminals. A growing number of communities do not trust the police and the police have become disconnected from the communities they are sworn to protect.
We must reform our criminal justice system. Black lives do matter. And we must value black lives.
We must move away from the militarization of police forces. We must invest in community policing. We need a federal initiative to completely redo how we train police officers in this country and give them body cameras.
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 morally repugnant and a national tragedy that we have privatized prisons all over America. In my view, corporations should not be allowed to make a profit by building more jails and keeping more Americans behind bars. We have got to end the private-for-profit prison racket in America!
The measure of success for law enforcement should not be how many people get locked up. We need to invest in drug courts and medical and mental health interventions for people with substance abuse problems, so that people struggling with addiction do not end up in prison, they end up in treatment.
For people who have committed crimes that have landed them in jail, there needs to be a path back from prison. The federal system of parole needs to be reinstated. We need real education and real skills training for the incarcerated.
We must end the over incarceration of non-violent young Americans who do not pose a serious threat to our society. It is an international embarrassment that we have more people locked up in jail than any other country on earth more than even the Communist totalitarian state of China. That has got to end. Instead of spending money on jails and incarceration, we should be investing in jobs and education!