Thank you.
I want to respond quickly to three points that have been made in discussion here.
First of all, I have to disabuse people of the idea that Obama would ever have been arrested and subject to mandatory minimums. He used drugs in the U.S. during the period of mandatory minimums, but the truth of the matter is that drug law enforcement is not equally targeted at people who use drugs. It's targeted at the poorest people, at the most vulnerable people. The fact that he was affluent, from an affluent background, going to an Ivy League school, ensured that he was not very likely to be targeted. Police don't do drug raids at Harvard. I know, because I went there, and I had lots of friends who used drugs, and the cops did not come looking for us. Okay? But where they will do drug raids is in public housing and low-income communities.
One of the things I didn't have time to make a point of is that the history of drug law enforcement in New York is that while drug use is pervasive among every socio-economic group, 95% of all the people incarcerated for drugs in New York have been poor African Americans and Latinos—95% of them. No one has ever argued to me, not a police person, not a prosecutor, or anyone else, that 95% of the people who bought, used, or sold drugs in New York were poor African American and Latinos, but that's who ended up behind bars.
I used to head a drug treatment program that served women in Harlem. The majority of the women who came to us—some 70% of them—particularly the ones who came to us through the criminal justice system, had histories of sexual or physical abuse; two-thirds of them were mothers; and most of them had been living on public assistance or were marginally employed. I think one of the most pernicious things about our drug laws is that the people who are targeted, the people who are affected, are always the people who are already at the short end of the stick of everything. So instead of using the laws to help people who need our help, we actually use them to punish the most vulnerable people. More than 150,000 children in New York State have been deprived of their parents for at least some part of their lives because of drug law convictions. Because of our laws now, if you're a woman who gets a sentence of two years or more, you run the risk of losing your parental rights forever, because one of the consequences of going to prison is that your kids can be put up for adoption.
So we need to actually look at who we're targeting and what the cumulative effect is of having.... We've had 36 years of this law, and the point I wanted to make about it is that the worst part about mandatory minimums is they pervert the very system of justice we're supposed to be protecting. They give people an incentive not only to go after the low-hanging fruit, but also to disproportionately target drug crimes, as if they were the most important area of law breaking. We went from having only 10% or 15%—