Cory Booker

As soon as I got out of law school, I went to inner city Newark, New Jersey, to become a housing rights lawyer, because people fought for my housing rights, I was going to pay it forward by fighting for others. ”

The gay people with whom I am close are some of the strongest, most passionate and caring people I know, and their demands for justice are no less imperative than those of any other community. ”

I have never articulated a specific number, but I think a nation as great as we are, that professes to favor freedom and liberty, that we would find a way to evidence that in our criminal justice system by achieving what we know we can achieve: a reduction in crime, a reduction in taxpayer expense, and a reduction in the prison population. ”

I am happy that the urgency to reform our broken criminal justice system has found allies all across the political spectrum. ”

We also must pull from our highest ideals of justice and protect against those ills that destabilized our economy - like predatory lending, over-leveraged financial institutions and the unchecked avarice of the past that trumped fairness and common sense. Our platform calls for significant cuts in federal spending. ”

I'm intending to work on juvenile justice reform, sentencing reform, reentry, drug treatment, access to mental health care. ”

In fact, when I first came to the Senate, people laughed. I had people telling me, 'There's no way you're going to get a comprehensive criminal justice reform bill done.' ”

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. ”

As I review the great history of our nation, community organizers have been at the center of so many of our great social movements. ”

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive. ”