Everyone, regardless of their political beliefs, wants a society that is just, and where laws are applied equally to everyone. To achieve that reality, we need to refocus our criminal justice system on the offenders that create the most damage – white collar crime, the leaders of crime syndicates, and the like. And we must prioritize rehabilitation and treatment over prison for low-level and nonviolent drug offenses and work to end the era of mass incarceration.
 
We need laws that make racial profiling illegal, provide police departments with body cameras, and support training on use of force and de-escalation techniques. We also need to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline by changing mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent, low-level drug arrests, devoting greater resources and training to treatment and rehabilitation, and reforming school disturbance laws to emphasize intervention rather than detention or arrest.
 
I support federal legislation to enable people returning from prison to re-enter society more easily, from encouraging companies and organizations to hire and invest in these individuals to fully restoring their voting rights. California is currently one of only 22 states that allows formerly incarcerated individuals to register to vote after their incarceration, probation, and parole are completed. States that add conditions to the reinstatement of voting rights – and states like Iowa and Kentucky, which have implemented lifetime bans on the voting rights of formerly incarcerated individuals – further contribute to the racial divide perpetrated by our criminal justice system. In fact, African American citizens are four times more likely to face disenfranchisement; 1 in 13 African American citizens of voting age are currently prohibited from voting due to felony convictions, compared to 1 in 40 Americans overall.
 
We urgently need to address a racist justice system in which Latinx and African American people are still far more likely to be profiled, stopped by police, and sentenced to longer prison terms than white people. Once elected, I will proudly sponsor legislation in the House similar to the Senate’s Harris-Paul bill that incentivize states to reform their systems of “money bail” and the Senate’s Booker-Blumenthal legislation that would incentivize states to reduce their prison populations and get rid of private prisons.
 
We also know that, for too long, Congress has operated under outdated norms related to cannabis that continue to punish already vulnerable populations and waste taxpayers money on enforcement. It’s time for the federal government to de-criminalize cannabis. And we need to make sure that tax money derived from legal cannabis sales go back to rebuilding communities that have been devastated by the drug wars, and that we pardon all those who are in the criminal justice system due to non-violent marijuana-related offenses that would now be considered legal.
 
Finally, we know that the laws themselves are not the only problem; the application of the law is also where inequity happens. It is imperative that we find ways to fix the procedural issues that cause so much harm in our criminal justice system.