For me, a lot of this is very personal, because I connect it with real folks I’ve met on my journey. Then I realize that this has just multiplied and multiplied in every state of our country and that good people are being ground into a bad system, often because the system preys disproportionately on the most vulnerable people—poor folks, mentally ill folks, addicted folks, and minorities.

Lantigua-Williams: What do you mean the system “preys” on them?

Booker: In college and [the upper-class community] where I grew up, people violated drug laws, but the criminal-justice system didn’t prey upon them. Yet, you see a much different reality in poor areas, where people who are doing a lot of the same behaviors are much more likely to be caught. There’s no difference between blacks and whites in dealing or using drugs, but blacks are almost four times more likely to be arrested for it. So clearly the system, as it functions now, disproportionately focuses on poor minority folks, mentally ill folks, and disabled folks.

Lantigua-Williams: Do you think that the system was designed to be effective in targeting this particular population?

Booker: In some ways there are clearly aspects of this that—I don’t know about designed—but that are obviously going to have a racially disproportionate impact, like the sentencing disparities between crack cocaine and powdered cocaine. Clearly, that was going to have a different effect on the poor versus the well-off. It was going to have a different effect on minority communities more often than nonminority communities. There are aspects of the system that are clear, but there’s also, as I’ve learned, something called “implicit racial bias”—which we all have, black or white—and how that often affects decisions. If you have a black defendant and a white defendant who are both convicted of the same crime, the black defendant could be more likely to end up getting a longer sentence or the mandatory minimum—whatever the cause, whether it was intended to be so, designed to be so, or just ended up being so. We know we have tools and abilities to do something about it. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Lantigua-Williams: When you say, “We know,” I think that pronoun might not apply to everyone. Particularly, it may not apply to some of your colleagues who don’t know, who haven’t had the personal experiences that you’ve had, who haven’t lived in the areas that are deeply impacted. How do you translate your collective knowledge when you’re behind closed doors and trying to convince fellow legislators that this is right, that this is what “we” should be doing?

Booker: First of all, I really appreciate the question because it’s important to talk about it because the “we” is actually bigger than most people think. That’s been the encouraging thing about my time in the Senate ... We’ve been able to get a bigger and bigger coalition than many people might have imagined ... “We” is actually much bigger. More directly to your question, I find that no matter where a person’s coming from, I can talk to them about their own values and how this broken criminal-justice system is a violation of their values.