Cory Booker Quotes

Our Keystone legislation received strong bipartisan support in the Senate. Although it didn't receive the 60 votes necessary for passage, 56 senators - a majority - voted in favor of the bill. Despite President Obama's actively lobbying against the bill, we still won the support of 11 Democrats.

I think there's bipartisan support in the Senate to pass a good reform bill.

I'd like to continue being involved with issues that animated my time as attorney general - criminal-justice reform and civil rights especially. I don't just want to give speeches; I'd like to involve myself in this work in a systematic way.

America's criminal justice system isn't known for rehabilitation. I'm not sure that, as a society, we are even interested in that concept anymore.

In January 2013, I told the people in the Justice Department after the re-election that I wanted to focus on reforming the federal criminal justice system. I made an announcement in August of that year in San Francisco, when we rolled out the Smart on Crime initiative.

Reform is not for the short-winded. I'm committed to making sure the Senate is more than just a graveyard for good ideas.

To change criminal justice policy in any meaningful way means to propose changing a very longstanding system. It's not realistic to think you can do it overnight.

I don’t care how long it takes. I don’t care if the Senate doesn’t do one other piece of business this year. You’ve got to keep this bill on the floor. You can tell Mansfield [the Senate Majority Leader] … The President of the United States doesn’t care if this bill is there forever. We are not going to have anything else hit the floor until this bill is passed.

While we always strive to reach 218 with Republican votes, sometimes that is not possible with divided government, and the story of a bill that passed with 150 Republican votes is much more positive and assertive than the story of a bill that passes with 79 Republican votes.

I think we need to rethink our ideas about what policing is and should be. I think we need to rethink our ideas about the criminal justice system as a whole, including the hysterically named corrections system. I mean, what's being corrected? Look, none of it's working.

Trying to explain the First Step Act in prison reform in a tweet or Facebook post is not easy.

We have a lot of folks who talk about immigration reform but haven't put their name on a bill.

I want to see changes in our criminal justice system.

As you may know, I'm the co-founder of a political organization called Real Justice. Our goal is to help elect progressive, reform-minded prosecutors and district attorneys that are committed to ending mass incarceration.

I've seen signs of life with regards to bipartisan support for criminal justice reform, but the support does not reflect the necessary urgency for real reform. This must be made a priority.

Boston's justice system is in serious need of reform. Many of its policies and practices are antiquated, expensive, and don't really even make Boston safer.

Immigration reforms are always controversial. Our Congress was created to muster political will to answer such challenges. Today we didn't, but tomorrow we will. I yield the floor.

I'd rather violate every one of the damn conventions and see my bills passed, than sit back in my office, all nice and proper, and watch 'em die.

I've laid out a platform that I think would begin to remedy some of the problems we have in the criminal justice system.

I'm not sure we will have every single Democrat ... but we want a large number of Republicans to be able to vote for this bill because we think that will encourage the House not only to move forward but to pass a bill.

It's time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population.

...this new idea of cure instead of punishment, so humane in seeming, had in fact deprived the criminal of all rights and by taking away the name Punishment made the thing infinite.

President Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison yesterday. Obama said it was a good chance to talk about prison reform, and to catch up with so many former congressmen.

I'm very proud to have joined with conservatives in both the Senate and the House to reform how we target bad guys.

We are incarcerating more people on a per capita basis in California than any country in the world other than South Africa or the Soviet Union.