1. Candidates unanimously agree on the need for justice reform. What is your primary reason for supporting reduction of the prison population? (Please select one)

 1. Candidates unanimously agree on the need for justice reform. What is your primary reason for supporting reduction of the prison population? (Please select one)

a.   To rectify racial injustices that disproportionately affect people of color.

b.     To make our justice system more cost effective and save taxpayer dollars.

c.     To provide individuals who have made mistakes with a second chance to live law-abiding lives.

d.     To end unfair practices that negatively impact individuals in lower socio-economic brackets.

e.     To improve the safety of our communities and lower the crime rate.

f.      Other.                                                      

Vice President Joe Biden

a.     To rectify racial injustices that disproportionately affect people of color.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg

a. To rectify racial injustices that disproportionately affect people of color.

Senator Bernie Sanders

f.      Other.

Today, the United States imprisons people at a higher rate than any other nation, in no small part due to extremely harsh sentencing policies and the War on Drugs. But mass incarceration has not made us any safer or reduced drug use and addiction. On the contrary, it has cost lives and diverted resources that could be used to prevent crime through social investment.

Due to the historical legacy of institutional racism in this country, mass incarceration disproportionately falls on the shoulders of black and brown people in America. In fact, black Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans, and even though people use drugs like marijuana at roughly the same rates across all races, black Americans are nearly four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white Americans. These disparities pervade every aspect of the criminal justice system. Black Americans, and especially young black men, are more likely to be stopped by the police, subjected to excessive force, arrested, and jailed than whites.

We must end the War on Drugs that has disproportionately affected black, brown, and low-income people.

Hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people in America have not been convicted of a crime and are solely in jail because they can’t afford their bail. We are criminalizing poverty.

When we are in the White House, we will finally make the deep and structural investments to rebuild the communities that mass incarceration continues to decimate. We will move away from an overly-punitive approach to public safety and start focusing on how to safeguard our communities, prevent the conditions that lead to arrests, and rehabilitate people who have made mistakes

Senator Elizabeth Warren

a. To rectify racial injustices that disproportionately affect people of color.

c. To provide individuals who have made mistakes with a second chance to live law-abiding lives.

d. To end unfair practices that negatively impact individuals in lower socio-economicbrackets.

Our current system is a result of dozens of choices that we’ve made, stacking the deck against the poor and the disadvantaged. Simply put, we have criminalized too many things. We send too many people to jail. We keep them there for too long. We do little to rehabilitate them. And we do all of this despite little evidence that our harshly punitive system makes our communities any safer. To make matters worse, the evidence is clear that there are structural race problems in this system. We cannot rectify this by nibbling around the edges. We need to tackle the problem at its roots by implementing a set of bold, structural changes at all levels of government.