Sen. Cory A. Booker responded Tuesday to fellow Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernard Sanders‘ plan to allow prisoners to have the right to vote, calling it a “frustrating debate that we seem to now be having.”

“As a guy who lives in an inner-city black community, and knows that there are millions of Americans that are being arrested and convicted and should never be there in the first — they not only lose their right to vote, but they lose their liberty,” Mr. Booker, New Jersey Democrat, said in an interview with “PBS News Hour.”

“We have a nation that takes away people’s liberty and their right to vote for doing things that two of the last three presidents admitted to doing. So if Bernie Sanders wants to get involved in a conversation about whether Dylann Roof and the [Boston] Marathon bomber should have the right to vote,” he said and then paused. Mr. Booker made a reference to Roof, who murdered nine people in a Charleston church.

“My focus is liberating black and brown people and low-income people from prison because we have a system in America … that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent,” he concluded.

Mr. Sanders of Vermont said during a CNN town hall last week that the right to vote should be given to every American citizen, “even for terrible people.”

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