 Reg, thank you very much for the introduction, 2020 leaders of America, thank you for putting on this important conference, and let me from the start suggest I am not Frank Underwood. The issue you are talking about is wrenching the hearts of the American people. Consciousness on criminal justice reform has risen significantly in the last couple of years. A lot of that has to do with this kind of invention here, where for years a lot of crimes were being committed that were not being talked about, but now when they get videoed and get on television, they are being talked about, and that is a very, very good thing. And it is clearly time that we start talking, as we have in this election, about the really disastrous effects of too many politicians trying to woo too many elections by locking too many people up. Now throughout our lives, all of us can remember we are going to be tough on crime, we are going to throw away the key, we are going to do this, we are going to do that, but all of that has resulted in an international disgrace, and I trust that all of you know it. That the United States of America today has more people in jail than any other country on earth, including China, which is authoritarian communist country four times our size. And we as a people have to lay this issue right on the table, and that is that people in American jails are disproportionately, to a very significant degree, people of color. And that is the reality in America today, and that is a reality that has to change. Too many lives, too, too many lives are being destroyed, and together we are going to bring about major reforms of a broken criminal justice system. Let me start with an issue that is on everyone's mind, and that is the continuing struggle for racial justice in America. And let's start with the facts. These are not pleasant facts, but these are facts we have got to discuss. If current trends continue, approximately one in four black males born today, a child born here in South Carolina today, can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime. This is an unspeakable tragedy. Blacks are imprisoned at six times the rate of whites. People of color are incarcerated, policed, and sentenced to death at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts. One in every 15 African American men is incarcerated compared to one in every 106 white men. A report by the Department of Justice found that blacks were three times more likely to be searched during a traffic stop compared to white motorists. African Americans are twice as likely to be arrested and almost four times as likely to experience the use of force during encounters with the police. African Americans make up two-fifths of confined youth today. African American women are three times more likely than white women to be incarcerated. As convicted, black offenders receive longer sentences, 10% longer than white offenders for the same exact crimes. 13% of African American men have lost the right to vote due to felony convictions. And this, by the way, is an issue we don't talk about very much, but it is of huge political consequence. 13% of African American men have lost their right to vote. These are shocking statistics, to say the least. But before we even address them, we have to deal with the most urgent and obvious issue that needs to be addressed head on. And that is the killing of African Americans by police or deaths while in custody. To a seemingly endless stream of tragedies, we hear about screams out for justice. The Black Lives Matter movement, which has arisen in response to these deaths, has done a needed and commendable job in raising public consciousness on this issue. The proliferation of cell phone video has brought the reality of these deaths into the living room and onto the computer screen of millions and millions of people throughout our country. I know you have heard these names before, but they bear repeating, so we do not lose sight of the real human price being paid. Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Samuel DeBose, Rikia Boyd, and many, many others. But people must do more than just echo the phrase Black Lives Matter. We must put actions behind those words. Cases that will bring about the fundamental reform that is needed in the face of this crisis. Criminal justice reform must be the civil rights issue of the 21st century, and the first piece that we must address is police reform. The killings of unarmed African Americans has got to stop. Our nation, too many African Americans and other minorities, find themselves subjected to a system that treats citizens who have not committed crimes as if they were criminals. A growing number of communities do not trust the police, and police have become disconnected, alien to the communities that they are sworn to protect. At the federal level, we need to establish a new model police training program that re-orients the way we do law enforcement in this country. With input from a broad segment of the community, we must reinvent how we police America. A critically important component of this reform is a set of new rules on the allowable use of force. Lethal force must be the last resort, not the first resort. Police officers need to be trained to de-escalate confrontations, and to humanely interact with people who have mental illnesses. Someone, and by the way, this happened in my own state of Vermont, not in Manari. Woman called the police department because her mentally ill son was acting out. Son got shot and killed, and that happens all across this country. We also need police forces that reflect the diversity of our communities, and that must extend into the leadership of police departments and into the training departments. Clearly, we need greater civilian oversight of police departments and ongoing and meaningful community engagement. We need to federally fund and require body cameras for law enforcement officers to make it easier to hold them accountable. But we also must establish standards and processes to protect the privacy of innocent people. Our justice department must aggressively investigate and prosecute police officers who break the law and hold them accountable for their actions. We may need to examine when current federal civil rights status provides the justice department to protect the people of this country. We need to require police departments and states to provide public reports on all police shootings and deaths that take place while in police custody. And the federal government should provide funding to help state and local governments adopt these new policing standards. State and local governments who participate in police reform should be rewarded by the federal government. Those who do not should have federal justice funding withheld. Further and very importantly, we must demilitarize police departments around this country. You know, sometimes you look at the television and it looks like there is an invading army. It looks like you're in Iraq rather than looking at a local police department. We have also got to establish standards and crack down on communities that are using their police forces essentially as revenue generators. Communities that receive an inordinate amount of their local funding through fines and citations need to be stopped. Finally, we have to deal with the level of policing in African American communities across this country. There is a strong sense among many activists and others that I have spoken to that there is over-policing in some African American communities. Now I know that some will say that's because there is more crime in those poor black urban communities. But if we jump to that conclusion, we should examine recent 2014 Bureau of Justice Statistics report examining the relationship between household poverty and non-lethal violent victimization, which includes rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault. And this is what it found for the period studied from 2008 through 2012. Poor people living in urban areas had violent victimization rates similar to poor people living in rural areas. Poor urban blacks had rates of violence similar to poor urban whites. Now I represent in Vermont a rural state, and I have to tell you that I do not see the level of intensity of policing that we seem to see in so many cities around the country. Now of course, people committing violent crimes need to be apprehended, tried by a jury of their peers, and if they are convicted, they need to go to jail. Many debates that we want criminals and people who are dangerous to law-abiding people off of the streets. And let me also say, and I say this is a former mayor, somebody who worked very closely with the Burlington Vermont Police Department, that the vast majority of police officers in this country are honest, they are working hard, and they do a good job on the very, very difficult circumstances. However, we cannot ignore the fact that the majority of people living in our cities are trying to work hard to play by the rules and to raise their children safely. There are neighborhoods in this country, and you all know this, where mothers, it's hard to believe in America, but it's true, where mothers are afraid to let their children go outside for fear of gang violence and drugs, and we owe it to those mothers to get dangerous people off the streets. But mothers should not be afraid of their children being targeted by the police because of the color of their skin, and they should not be worried that a routine interaction with law enforcement ends in an inappropriate force or even death. We do not want any mother in America to have to worry about that. But of course, criminal justice reform goes well beyond reforming police departments. We have to rethink our entire approach. We cannot jail our way out of health problems like drug addiction or social and economic problems like poverty. We must end the over-incarceration of nonviolent young Americans who do not pose a serious threat to our society. African Americans comprise 14 percent of regular drug users, but are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses. From 1980 to 2007, about one in three adults arrested for drugs in the United States was African American. Now, how many – I want you to think about this. How many encounters between young people and the police begin with offices detecting the odor of marijuana? It is unacceptable to me that we stigmatize so many young Americans with a criminal record for possessing marijuana. But at the same time, not one major CEO of a Wall Street bank whose illegal activities help destroy the economy of the United States, not one of them has a police record. It appears that we have a criminal justice system which says that a not only is a bank too big to fail, but bankers are too big to jail. And by the way, all of that, the fact that hundreds and hundreds of lives of young people have been destroyed because they get police records for smoking marijuana, and the fact that no CEOs of Wall Street firms get police records, all of this has a huge impact upon people's attitude toward the government, upon justice, upon fairness. But in that regard, our attitude toward marijuana must change, and I'm happy to tell you that I've introduced legislation which takes marijuana off of the federal list of controlled substances. It is frankly absurd under the controlled substance act that marijuana is a schedule one drug alongside of heroin, makes no sense at all to me. So we want to get the federal government out of the business of making marijuana illegal if states want to go for it, that is their right to do that, and they should be able to do that without legal impediments from the federal government. Furthermore, when we talk about reforming a broken criminal justice system, we need to end prisons for profit. And I've introduced legislation to do that, and as president I will make that happen. It is simply wrong for corporations to be making profits through the incarceration of fellow Americans or running detention centers. That is not an area where people should be making profits. We furthermore have got to invest in drug courts and interventions for people with substance abuse problems. And our goal must be that people with substance abuse problems, and by the way, this is a huge problem from one end of this country to the other, huge problem in my state. Vermont, not a drug problem. We have a very serious problem with opiates and heroin. It is a problem all over America, but what we must understand is that substance abuse is a disease, not a crime, and we've got to treat it as a health issue. And in that regard, we have got to do a lot, lot better with mental health in America. We need a revolution in how we treat mental health. When people want to get off of heroin, get off of opiates, they should be able to get into a treatment center and get the care they need, not have to wait for two years. In addition, we need to end mandatory minimum sentencing and give judges the discretion to better tell the sentences to the specific facts of a given case. As you know, judges often now do not have discretion. The federal system of parole needs to be reinstated. For people who are serving long sentences, there needs to be an incentive for people to make different choices and earn their way to a shorter sentence and a path to a productive life. For people who have committed crimes, that have landed them in jail, there needs to be a path back from prison, and that includes a restoration of full voting rights. Now, I don't have to tell you that by and large, we do a pretty bad job in making sure that when people are released from jail, they don't end up in jail again. Clearly, you don't have to be a criminologist to understand that if somebody leaves jail without job training, without education, without money, without housing, the odds are that they will fall back into the same environment that got them in jail in the first place. And that is a waste of human life, and that is a huge waste of taxpayers' dollars, and we have got to end that. And if we are truly going to move away from over-incarceration, there are a number of systemic issues that we must address, but let me just mention two of them now. The first is the disparity in education for children in poor communities and poor communities of color in particular. Black children who make up just 18% of preschoolers account for 48% of all out-of-school suspensions before kindergarten, and that just tells you how systemic this problem is. We are failing our black children before kindergarten. Black students were expelled at three times the rate of white children. Black girls were suspended at higher rates than all other girls and most boys. According to the Department of Education, African American students are more likely to suffer harsh punishments, suspensions, and arrests at school. We must address the lingering unjust stereotypes that lead us to label black youths as thugs or super predators. Let me tell you just the story if I might. Some part of my state there was a principal she has retired who was absolutely fierce and determined that kids in her high school would not drop out of school. She would personally kill them if they dropped out of school. She knew all of these kids. She assigned mentors who were available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so that if a kid had a family problem at three o'clock in the morning, there was somebody that kid could call. If a kid was dealing with drugs or getting involved in that, the mentor was there. The truth of the matter is, if we are serious about keeping kids out of jail, if we are serious about making sure our kids are in school or have jobs, yes, we can do that. We do not need to allow millions of kids to fall through the cracks, to hang out on street corners, to get into trouble, to end up in jail, and to see their lives destroyed. We need to give all of our kids, regardless of their income, a fair shot at attending college. Now, my parents never went to college. My dad dropped out of high school, my mother graduated high school. And in our family, which was low and middle class, we didn't know many people who went to college. That's just the way it is. There are millions of kids in this country whose parents never went to college. They don't know anybody who went to college. And the idea of getting a higher education is about as meaningful to them as going to the moon. It ain't going to happen. And that is why I have introduced legislation and will make happen as president, a process by which every public college and university in America is tuition free. Now, why is that important? Well, we know the obvious reasons why, so people don't come out of school deeply in debt and so forth. But here is a more important reason, and I want you to think about it, because it really is revolutionary. What it says is that every child in America, whether in my hometown of Burlington, Vermont, or here in Columbia, South Carolina, if you do your school work well, if you pay attention, if you are serious about school, you will be able to go to college regardless of the income of your family. Students of kids and teachers will have hope and belief that they can make it into the middle class if they do well in school. We have to stop the criminalization of classroom misbehavior. Who in this room was not horrified by the video that we recently saw of the resource officer throwing a young girl across the room right here in South Carolina? There is a pipeline from school to jail that we have to turn into a pipeline from school to a promising future. The second issue that we have got to deal with, because all of these issues are interrelated. They have to be dealt with in a holistic manner, is the issue of poverty. We are living today in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, but very few people know that, because most of the wealth, almost all of the wealth and almost all of the income being generated today goes to the top 1%. We have 47 million people in America living in poverty and shamefully, and this is a total disgrace. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth. 20% of our kids, close to 40% of African American kids. Now you tell me, the justice of a society in which the top 1 tenth of 1% owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%, tell me the justice of a society in which we are seeing a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires, and yet we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth. That is a disgrace, that is not what America is supposed to be about, and together we are going to end that. We live at a time when most Americans don't have $10,000 in savings, imagine that. Wealthiest country in the history of the world, the majority of people in this country do not have $10,000. What happens if you have an automobile accident, what happens if you get sick, what happens if there's a divorce? And millions of Americans, age 50, 55, have zero in the bank, they have no clue as to how they're going to retire with dignity. Most black and Latino households have less than $350 in savings. The black unemployment rate has remained roughly twice as high as the white rate over the last 40 years regardless of education. Let me tell you another story. I asked some economists a few months ago to do a study for me. I asked them to tell me what the rate of real unemployment, that is unemployment and underemployment for young people in this country, 17 to 20, who graduated high school, didn't drop out, graduated high school. This is what they said. My kids, 33 percent, Latino kids, 36 percent, African American kids, 51 percent. That's an entire generation of kids graduating high school, want to get their feet on the ground, want to get out of the house, want to start their adult lives, nothing out there for them. So let me repeat. It makes a lot more sense for us to invest in education and jobs rather than jails and incarceration. Now, I won't give you a long speech about how we deal with the collapse of the American middle class and 47 million people living in poverty, but this is what I will tell you. We have got to create millions of jobs in this country, and one way we do it is by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. We can put 13 million people back to work at good paying jobs. Another thing that we have got to do is recognize that a $7.25 minimum wage is a starvation wage, got to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, and that to my mind is 15 bucks an hour over the next few years. We have to make sure that poor communities have access to credit on fair terms, not payday lenders. You know, the pathetic truth is it is very expensive to be poor. You know what I mean by that? You cash your check and you pay an outrageous sum of money because you are not able to get a bank account and a normal bank. We have got to change those things. Let me just conclude by thanking you all very much for holding this conference on an issue I get around the country a whole lot. These issues that we are talking about today are on the minds of millions and millions of Americans, not just African Americans, but the entire community. We want to live in a nation in which we are not spending $80 billion a year locking up our neighbors. We want to live in a nation where an African American get in to his or her car and not worry about being dragged out of the car and being found dead three days later in a jail. So we got a lot of work in front of us. But this is an issue to my mind of enormous importance. It's an issue that we can and must work on together and I have absolute confidence that when we come together, this is an issue that can be resolved. Thank you all very much.