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>>Cory Booker: Let me deal with two complex problems. And I love talking about these problems
to people of any political persuasion, because whether you are somebody who hates big government
or believes in government, you have to join with me in saying that perhaps some of the
greatest waste in America right now is the fact that we're investing in systems that
produce such abhorrent failure. The criminal justice system is one of those
systems that we spend billions of dollars, billions of dollars annually, in a correctional
system in New Jersey, for example, that does nothing to correct the problems.
The other system is this system of public education that right now is failing to prepare
the majority of our children for a 21st century economy that is a knowledge-based economy.
The more you learn, the more you earn. And forget about earn, the more you contribute,
the more you grow. Now, the criminal justice system, actually,
my team said, this is crazy. My friend, Michael Bloomberg, says this all the time. We're unconscious
to the fact that every day, we are a Virginia Tech in America. Every single day, there's
30 plus people murdered in our city, countless more that are shot, every day. And I always
joke with my friends, I said, you know, guys who get shot don't show up to the hospital
with health insurance. In fact, we found out the victims of shootings in our city, about
83 or 84% of them have been arrested before. And the average arrests are ten times that
they have been engaged in the criminal justice system as adults, not to mention their child
arrests. We couldn't believe it when we started seeing
this pattern that we have in America of criminality that becomes ingrained. In fact, generationally
ingrained, because the children who most likely go to prison in America are children of incarcerated
adults. And so we started looking at this system and saying, why are we engaged in this
ridiculous game that we believe that somehow there's some correlation between the more
arrests we do and the lower crime. There's no correlation whatsoever. And my police officers,
one of them was here, sitting over there on the side -- yes, he has his gun with him.
[ Laughter ] >>Cory Booker: Jim Stier (phonetic), behave
yourself, or we're coming after you. My police officers could drive by corners
and name the guys there. And when we would get out in the corners and I would engage
the fellows, the fellows would know who the police officers are.
And so we started saying that there has to be the ability for Americans to innovate a
way out of this. There's got to be a way to create radical shifts in realities.
We said, let's start experimenting with system change to demonstrate in a policy way that
we have choices in America to make. And so we started looking around. Who is doing
something to end this nightmare that when a person is arrested, that they won't leave
a system with 60-plus, 60 to 70-plus come right back? So we started trying to find new
ways. We looked at programs all around the country. First of all, we found out when we
interviewed guys that they come out and they all express a desire to do the right thing.
One of my friends who's very involved in the criminal justice system, guys on the street,
says, 5% are knuckleheads. You can go to any profession, from politicians, to you name
it, 5% of us are knuckleheads and belong under a prison. But 95% actually are far more rational
economic actors than you think. So a guy coming out of prison who can't get a driver's license,
they know who they are to arrest him, but he comes out, doesn't have identification,
it's an amazing struggle, doesn't want to go see the mother of their children because
they owe them so much money in child support payments. Has warrants out for their arrest
because in prison they had a traffic ticket, became a failure to pay, failure to appear,
with a warrant. All of these administrative law problems, we start listening to them and
said, okay, let's innovate. We found out there was no legal support for
these guys. So we pulled all our law firms in Newark together to create the nation's
first pro bono legal service project. And we said to the law firms, help us stop crime.
A little bit of administrative law help can help these guys. It was amazing. The law firms
found that their associates were loving it, because the liberated the economic potential
of guys, helping them expunge records, get driver's licenses and IDs. We said, look at
these guys, they're coming out and they need rapid attachment to work. This is a bad economy.
But let's find out ways to get them attached to work. We've done everything in Newark from
partnering with businesses to start a niche in our city. We didn't have any fumigation
businesses based in Newark. We started one solely for the purpose of hiring guys when
they come home. It's called Pest at Rest. I did not think of the name.
[ Laughter ] >>Cory Booker: We realize guys, there's got
to be a better marketer in this room, please. It sounds like a spa for bugs.
[ Laughter ] >>Cory Booker: We found out that guys coming
home, that one of the biggest things they said they wanted to be, imagine this, was
great fathers. But yet they were often absentee fathers.
And you talk to them about why that was, and there were logical reasons that they had for
not being involved in their kids' lives. So we created a partnership program with these
guys where we brought in other men to be mentors to the guys, fathers being mentors to other
fathers. We actually created a fraternity of men around it. It wasn't in a fraternity
at Stanford, but I wanted to create one, so we created Delta Alpha Delta Sigma, DADS.
[ Laughter ] >>Cory Booker: And we had parenting classes.
I learned how to be a dad even though my parents are saying, why aren't you one. I learned
how, because at 5:00 in the morning, when I was in first grade, the first sound I would
hear on a snow day was my dad shoveling snow, because he was going to get to work. We started
having group activities for the women, and helped the men negotiated child support payments,
took care of everything, and before you knew it, we had this program that now over five
years has a recidivism rate not where New Jersey's is, about 65%. It has a recidivism
rate lower than 3%. We have a program now, a one-stop center,
partially funded by the Manhattan Institute. I got a right-leaning think tank in New York,
partnering with grass-roots activists who can't say the word Republican without gagging,
but partnering in Newark city hall with a program right now that for the men that come
to our -- men and women who come to our program, we have a 70% placement rate for jobs, working
with local companies. That one small aspect of our program has saved the state of New
Jersey millions of dollars. We are Americans. There is nothing we can't
do. But we allow ourselves to get caught in the grooves of a record playing the same old
tired song over and over again, surrendering our power, surrendering our authority, surrendering
our responsibility. In fact, we get into a state of what I call sedentary agitation,
where we see the kids shot on TV and inner city. We're upset about it, but we take no
responsibility for it. We don't get up and do something about it. We fail to say that
our destiny is fully linked up with the destiny of another American. And I know it is.
Go to Google and put in the words, "McKinsey disparity education." A report will pop up,
a 2009 McKinsey report, where they looked at the impact in America of the disparities
of educational outcomes alone. They said the impact on GDP alone is about 1.3 to 2.3 trillion
dollars, trillion dollars. You see, something I know is that genius is equally distributed
in America, equally distributed. You'll find it everywhere from inner cities to suburbs,
from farm areas, and that our greatest natural resource as a nation is the minds of our children.
But yet we've rolled them away in more of a gross offense than the oil spill in the
Gulf. And the reason why I get excited about this problem is because we've shown ways of
solving it. I could take you to Newark, New Jersey, right now, and show you schools in
my city that are outperforming the wealthiest suburbs.
The answers are there. The question is, is do we have the will?
I talked to the Ford Foundation and they're, like, we've spent lots of money in investment,
but we know some of the things that actually work. We're doing them in Newark now. Some
of our schools just take simple equations. Like, when I was going to school, time was
a constant, achievement was the variable. You go to school 180 days in New Jersey. If
there's a snow day, they're going to smack another one on. Even if we were, like I was,
in Harrington Park Elementary, sitting in the cafeteria watching reruns of The Little
Rascals. You're going to be in that building 180 days. Look at contracts for teachers and
principals, it's all about time. My highest-performing schools in Newark have switched that equation
around and said that achievement is going to be the constant; time is going to be the
variable. They go to school, longer school days, longer school weeks.
We have Saturday classes, mandatory Saturday classes. Longer school years.
And funny enough, that's what our competitor nations are doing.
The answers are out there. Whether in reforming our criminal justice system, I can tell you
from all over our country, incredible things in innovations are going on.
In education, we see things that are working but we are lacking the political will, the
collective will, the individual will. I'm a mayor of a big city. I have got a lot of
things to do. But I see it all the time. If every American who was able just mentored
a kid -- You can actually do online mentoring now. All mentoring, I have seen study after
study shows you drive down the level of criminal activity. You drive down the level of early
sex practices. You drive up the success of schools. But, yet, we as Americans, who drink
deeply from wells of freedom and liberty that we did not dig, we lavishly eat from banquet
tables that were prepared for us by our ancestors. We are too often just sitting around getting
drunk on the sacrifice and struggle of other people's labors and forgetting that we are
a part of a noble mission in humanity, the first nation formed not as a monarchy, not
as a theocracy but as an experiment, an idea that a diverse group of people, that when
we come together, e pluribus unum, that we can make a greater whole out of the sum of
our parts.