Everywhere among the English-speaking race criminal justice was rude, and punishments were barbarous; but the tendency was to do away with special privileges and legal exemptions.
As a prosecutor and a senator, one of my main criminal justice priorities has been enforcing and reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, a bill with deep roots in Minnesota, seeds planted by former Senator Paul Wellstone and his wife Sheila.
We need to make meaningful, uh, adjustments, here in this country with criminal justice, with education inequities, with real racial inequities in terms of health care.
Our criminal justice system is failing all of us. It is not keeping us safe. It is contributing to a vicious cycle of crime and punishment.
My mother negotiated a plea deal, and my father went to trial. I think one thing we notice in their case that kind of stands out is how, in some ways, arbitrary the outcomes in the criminal justice system can be. And they did basically the same thing, identical thing.
There's an awful lot about our criminal justice system that is dysfunctional. Everyone who sets foot in a criminal courtroom will see myriad ways the system is dysfunctional.
What we're doing in San Francisco and what we're doing with other criminal justice partners across the state and across the country is anything but indiscriminate. We are being careful. We are being focused and surgical in our efforts to decrease the jail population.
Years now, decades, of visiting my parents behind bars taught me hard lessons about how broken the criminal justice system is - about how devoid of compassion it is. It's not healing the harm that victims experience. It's not rehabilitating people. And in many ways, it's making us less safe.
I'm very mindful of the need to ensure we have a criminal justice system in which people have confidence.