Taking a Stand

by Rand Paul

  I came away from my talks with Reverend Cosby with a new understanding—a new resolve. It was in the West End that I first began to sense the unease that would later explode in Ferguson and on Staten Island.

  Even before I was elected, I met Pastor Jerry Stephenson from the Midwest Church of Christ in the West End. Jerry was concerned about the dropout rate of the students in the West End and disillusioned with the policies of the Department of Education. It was from these early conversations, and talks with other city leaders, that I began to see firsthand just how dire the need for education reform was in poorer neighborhoods. Jerry shared my vision of school choice, and he lamented the fact that many students in the West End had to travel forty-five minutes by bus or car to get a decent education.

  In the West End, I reached out to Markham French at the Plymouth Community Renewal Center, a nonprofit urban mission. Markham organized a roundtable of people from the community. From them, I heard stories of how criminal records prevented people who had served their time and had reformed from getting good jobs; I learned how government confiscates homes for unpaid taxes; how it can shut down private businesses when an employee gets caught with drugs. I saw eyes fill with tears as people told stories of homes broken apart by a war on drugs that imposes excessive sentencing and carts too many fathers off to prison, from which they don’t return. I met a woman who’d found Christianity, quit her drug habit, and wanted to care for her two kids but was under the threat of a mandatory minimum sentence of a decade for a drug charge.

  In one of our discussions, I met Christopher 2X and learned about his weekly youth group called the War Zone that helps West End teenagers deal with violence that erupts too often in their neighborhood.

  This is where I saw the hope and promise that the West End owns. I visited with Larry McDonald, the president of the Lincoln Foundation, which is dedicated to scholarships, mentorships, and after-school guidance for disadvantaged children. I met with the scholars, including one fifteen-year-old who told me he wanted to become a lawyer. I believe that young man can become whatever he wants to be. That’s how it should be for all of the children of the West End, for all the children of both our impoverished inner cities and rural communities, for all American children.

  From the time I decided to run for public office, my plan was always to champion issues such as school choice, sentencing reform, and employment empowerment that I believed were of particular concern to our country’s poor. But it was in the West End that my plan solidified.

  From Louisville, I traveled to Nashville, Philadelphia, Chicago, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Detroit, and elsewhere. I visited charter schools, community centers, and local Urban Leagues. In each place, my resolve to change the policies and dismantle the overblown bureaucracy that has failed to serve poor communities for generations grew stronger. Today, it grows stronger still. During these travels I made a vow that I would work tirelessly to change how government disproportionately treats minorities unfairly. Here are some of my plans.

  Mandatory Minimum Sentencing

  Several years back there was a very popular HBO television series called The Wire. In March 2008, the writers and creators of the show wrote an op-ed that appeared in Time magazine.5 It read in part:

  Since declaring war on drugs… we’ve been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.

  Our criminal justice system as it pertains to the war on drugs went off track in the 1980s and ’90s with the “broken windows” theory of policing. The theory espoused the idea that targeting smaller crimes like graffiti and other vandalism in urban areas, or, to use a more recent tragic example, the selling of loose cigarettes, will stop the escalation to more serious criminal behavior. The controversial stop and frisk tactic used by the New York City Police Department grew out of this theory. The broken windows approach to law enforcement wasn’t limited to New York, however. It became a national mindset. From 2001 to 2010, marijuana arrests accounted for nearly half of all drug arrests. In fact, according to a recent FBI report, someone is arrested for a marijuana crime every forty-two seconds.6 Nearly 90 percent of those arrests are for simple possession, and many of them occur in inner-city areas. Why? Because it’s easier to arrest people who live close together and where there are more police patrols. It’s easier to arrest people who live in poverty. People who are trapped in these crime-infested neighborhoods often have no means to escape, which exacerbates the cycle.

  Federal incentives also drive arrests in minority areas. Departments across the country compete for anti-drug grants dispersed by the U.S. government. Federal money encourages police departments to overstep their power. According to a report by the Drug Policy Alliance (drugpolicy.org), between the years 1981 and 1995 New York City police made 33,775 marijuana arrests. Between 1996 and 2010 they made 536,322.

  But, as the writers of The Wire eloquently stated, under our current federal policies, little has actually been accomplished to lessen drug use, while irreparable damage has been done to even the most casual drug users. If Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama were caught and penalized for their alleged and/or acknowledged drug use, under our current laws, they would have been barely employable, let alone allowed to become presidents of the United States.

  This is a conservative issue. We spend an enormous amount of money and resources on prisons. Right now, U.S. prisons hold more than 2.4 million people. That’s more than the population of Houston, and just a little under the number of people who live in Chicago. Since 1980, the American prison population has quadrupled. Since 1998, the main reason people are in federal prison is because of mandatory and longer sentences for drug offenders. Recently George Will wrote that in California alone there are currently 2,000 inmates who didn’t commit violent crimes serving twenty-year to life sentences because of the “three strikes and you’re out” law of that state. The average inmate in federal prison costs the American taxpayer between $21,000 and $33,000 a year, and those costs are expected, by 2020, to jump to 30 percent of the Department of Justice’s budget. In 2013, the DOJ’s budget was more than $27 billion.7 In 2015, I supported Proposition 47 in California, which reduces some nonviolent drug felonies to misdemeanors. Within months, enough space opened up in prisons to keep violent criminals for their entire sentence. Before Prop 47, violent criminals were sometimes released because of overcrowding, some serving only 20 percent of their sentences.

  The money spent on prisons has no return. Inmates don’t pay taxes, they don’t buy goods or services, and they don’t hire anyone. For all the good we supposedly do with rehabilitation, we might as well flush the money down the toilet. According to a Pew study, 40 percent of ex-cons commit crimes within three years of release from prison.8

  How bad an investment is prison funding? A statistic used in the movie Waiting for “Superman,” a documentary about the ineptitude of our system of education, puts the cost of our prisons into perspective. In Pennsylvania, 68 percent of inmates are high school dropouts. The state spends $33,000 a year on each prisoner, making the total cost of the average prison term, which is about four years, $132,000.9 The average private school costs $8,300 a year.10

  So for the same amount we spend on the average inmate’s time in prison, we could have sent that person to private school from kindergarten to twelfth grade and still had $24,000 left for college.

  My views on these reforms mean much more to me than just numbers or the amount of money we can save. The supply and demand of illegal drugs is a rapacious creditor, but the punishment for its use is patently unfair. Nowhere is this inequity felt more deeply than in our minority communities. The majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, but three-fourths of the people in prison for drug offenses are African American or Latino. Many with previous petty marijuana arrests receive long prison sentences, includin
g life sentences. The injustice of these laws is impossible to ignore when you hear the stories of the victims.

  For example, consider Atiba Parker. When he was twenty-nine, he was arrested for selling three grams of crack cocaine. Because of prior misdemeanor marijuana arrests, he was sentenced to forty-two years, according to the advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums.

  Then there’s Weldon Angelos, a twenty-four-year-old Utah music entrepreneur who received a fifty-five-year sentence for a few small pot sales. According to Brett Tolman, a former U.S. Attorney for Utah, the DEA could have busted Angelos after the first undercover buy but instead waited until Angelos was carrying a gun, which he had strapped to an ankle holster. Angelos was a small-time pot dealer. He never brandished the gun, let alone shot it. Even the judge in the case thought the mandatory sentence he was forced to give Angelos was ridiculous.11

  Then there’s Timothy Tyler. Journalist Andrea Jones tells Tyler’s story in the October 2014 issue of Rolling Stone. A Deadhead, like a generation of other kids, Tyler followed the Grateful Dead for years. He was well known on the Dead’s tours, operating a popular fried dough stand. Like some other Deadheads, he also liked to drop acid. In 1992, he mailed 5.2 grams of blotter acid to a friend in Florida who had become a confidential informant, no doubt under pressure of pending charges. Then, while Tyler was tripping on acid, police picked him up—he thought he was building a dam in the middle of a road. He was hospitalized but arrested on his release for mailing the acid. The fact that it was blotter acid (LSD soaked into paper) increased the weight of the transaction. He was ultimately sentenced to a mandatory minimum of double life. He was just twenty-three years old when he was arrested; Tyler’s jail time ends only when he dies.

  In no way, shape, or form do these sentences have anything to do with justice.

  We need drug sentencing that makes sense.

  We need to get rid of the lopsided penalties of crack cocaine sentencing altogether. We should free those who are in jail under the old guidelines. Our prisons are bursting with young men—and women—who are poor or of color (usually both), and our communities are full of broken families because of it. Mandatory penalties came about in the 1980s. At the time, there were approximately 25,000 federal prisoners. Today, that number exceeds 218,000.12

  Our criminal justice system continues to consume, confine, and define our young men. In the Senate, I’ve introduced the RESET Act, a bill that would reclassify simple possession of small amounts of controlled substances from a low-level felony charge to a misdemeanor. It also eliminates the crack cocaine disparity.

  Along with Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democrat from Vermont, I’ve also introduced the Justice Safety Valve Act of 2013, which expands the so-called “safety valve” that allows judges to impose a sentence below the mandatory minimum in qualifying drug cases. This legislation is driven by common sense, something that’s severely lacking in Washington. Mandatory minimums disproportionately target the poor and minorities. Getting rid of mandatory minimums simply means allowing judges to use discretion in sentencing, rather than being bound to draconian federal parameters that discount any mitigating circumstances or human factors.

  Given greater flexibility, judges won’t be forced to administer needlessly long sentences for certain offenders, which is a significant factor in the ever-increasing federal prison population and spiraling prison costs. Taxpayers would be better served by investing that money in programs that keep our communities safe and get those who have paid their debt to society back in society.

  Across the Aisle

  Pat Leahy isn’t the only Democrat with whom I’m working on these issues. I’ve also teamed up with Senator Cory Booker from New Jersey. Though some in the press have dubbed us a “political Odd Couple,” we’re really not all that dissimilar. We’re both freshmen senators. We both have big ideas and the energy to match, and we both try to get beyond petty partisanship.

  Together, we introduced the REDEEM Act, a law that would give Americans convicted of nonviolent crimes a second chance at the American Dream. The legislation helps prevent youthful mistakes from turning into a lifetime of crime by setting up a process to expunge criminal records for people who stay clean. The bill also helps adults who commit nonviolent crimes become more self-reliant and less likely to commit future crimes.

  The bill would expunge or seal the records of juveniles who commit nonviolent crimes before they turn fifteen and allow eligible nonviolent criminals to petition a court to ask that their criminal records be sealed. Sealing the records would keep them out of the FBI background checks often requested by employers and would likely make it easier for former offenders to secure a job.

  Last but not at all least, the legislation would place limits on the solitary confinement of most juveniles. The idea of putting a teenager in solitary confinement for a marijuana arrest is outrageous, and yet the practice of locking youthful offenders away by themselves happens at an alarming rate. The results can be disastrous.

  When he was just thirteen, Kevin DeMott tried to hold up a Little Caesar’s pizza restaurant in Battle Creek, Michigan, with a toy gun. He owed money to a local marijuana dealer. Kevin was arrested and two years later sentenced to prison for up to five years on four counts of attempted armed robbery. He spent four months in solitary confinement in Ionia Maximum Correctional Facility. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder when he was eleven, he was found in his solitary cell banging his head against a bloodied brick wall. He was pepper sprayed and locked in chains and leg irons.13

  This is unconscionable. It must not be allowed to happen.

  Our criminal justice system takes kids who make youthful mistakes and punishes them for a lifetime. I know a guy about my age who grew marijuana plants in his apartment in college. Thirty years later, he still can’t vote, can’t own a gun, and when he looks for work, he must check a box that basically says, “I’m a convicted felon, and I guess I’ll always be one.”

  Even misdemeanor convictions erode the foundation of a good life. They can cause the suspension of driver’s licenses, impacting the ability of the person to make a living or care for children, and they take away professional licenses that do the same.

  Don’t get me wrong. People who are in prison for harming other people should be kept in prison. But people who are in prison for harming themselves should be given a second chance. The biggest impediment to civil rights and employment in our country is a criminal record. Our current system is broken and has trapped tens of thousands of young men and women in a cycle of poverty and incarceration.

  It has to stop. Given the chance, I will do all I can to stop it.

  Voting Restoration

  The Brennan Center for Justice here in Washington isn’t exactly a bastion of conservatism, and especially when the American Civil Liberties Union sponsors an event there. Yet there I was, sharing the dais with several convicted felons and Senator Ben Cardin, the Democrat from Maryland. Just for the record, Ben is not a convicted felon (he has been described as a hard-core liberal, though)!

  As one Beltway observer wrote, it was perhaps the last place you’d expect to find a Republican with higher political aspirations.

  I took the remark as a compliment, because out of all the minority issues I’ve been fighting for, this might be the most important.

  Lyndon Johnson once called the right to vote “the struggle for human rights.”

  Martin Luther King Jr. said, “So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote, I do not possess myself.”14

  The face of the Republican Party should not be about suppressing the vote but about enhancing the vote. I’m sure you’ve heard that there has been some controversy about this topic recently. An unflattering light has been cast on my party. To be frank, I believe most of the rhetoric is by partisans who have tried to make voter ID into some sort of voter suppression movement, when most advocates are simply trying to promote honest elections.

  To make matters worse, th
e media has thoroughly confused my position on voter ID. I’ve said it’s dumb of my party to make it such a big issue. I’ve been showing my driver’s license for twenty years in Kentucky. Nevertheless, many folks in the minority community think that the intent is voter suppression and that it’s up to us—the Republican Party—to change that perception. To help people understand that Republicans aren’t for suppressing voting, I have taken a prominent role in trying to restore voting rights for nonviolent felons who have served their time.

  According to the Sentencing Project,15 8 percent of the black voting-age population of the United States isn’t allowed to vote because they’ve been convicted of a felony. For whites, it’s 1.8 percent. The total number of people who are not allowed to vote because of felony convictions is 5.85 million.16

  Testifying in front of the state legislature in Frankfurt, Kentucky, I urged my home state to restore voting rights to some nonviolent felons. I spoke about the racial disparity of drug incarceration rates, about unfair sentencing, about how doors to jobs are closed to these men and women who have served their time—a third of all nonworking men between ages twenty-five and fifty-four have a criminal record, according to a New York Times/CBS News/Kaiser Family Foundation poll.17 Here’s the cycle many are trapped in: they start out in poverty, make a youthful mistake, go to jail, sometimes have child support payments that build up to thousands of dollars while they’re in jail, get out of jail, can’t pay their child support, can’t get work, and then go back to jail for either not paying their child support or going back to a life of crime. Then, on top of this cycle of hopelessness, they’re not allowed to vote.