Adapted from Sen. Cory Booker’s book, United, the Atlantic publishes thoughts from the New Jersey policymaker.
“Every day of that campaign, I had learned that my ward, which was upward of 90 percent blacks and Latinos, housed thousands of men desperate to go to work, to contribute to their families, to assert their dignity through a job—desperate for an opportunity even if it was minimum wage and manual labor. But these men were being limited by previous convictions, many of them minor.”