[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 6 (Tuesday, February 1, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: February 1, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                         CRIME IN THIS COUNTRY

                                 ______


                         HON. ROBERT A. BORSKI

                            of pennsylvania

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, February 1, 1994

  Mr. BORSKI. Mr. Speaker, last night the President spoke to the Nation 
about the serious problems of crime in the United States. I rise today 
to further emphasize this issue. As you know, the problem of crime in 
this country has grown in the last few decades. Criminals on the 
streets are more visible these days, present in greater numbers and 
heavily armed. As a result, the police and court systems frequently 
find themselves unable to adequately handle this growing problem due to 
limited manpower and overcrowding of the Nations correction facilities. 
Nowhere is the problem of crime more evident than in the Nations 
cities. Therefore, as the House and Senate meet in these next few weeks 
to discuss the future of crime prevention, I thought it would be 
helpful to include excerpts from a speech given by Lynn Abraham, the 
District Attorney of Philadelphia:
       In 1992, there were 23,760 murders--that's 65 a day. 
     Twenty-five percent, or 5,356 deaths, were people under 19 
     years of age. Fifty percent were between 15 and 35 years old. 
     Fifty percent of the dead were black and seventy-eight 
     percent were men. One-third of the women killed were killed 
     by their boyfriends or husbands--Forty percent of the women 
     who died on the job were murdered. In five states, Homicide 
     is the leading cause of death while at work. We also managed 
     to kill an average of six police officers every month. 
     Eighty-five percent of these victims knew or were acquainted 
     with their assailants.
       Fifty-five percent of those arrested for murder were under 
     twenty-five and one-third of all violent crime, nationwide, 
     is committed by adolescents, that is, people who are under 
     twenty-one and that percentage is rapidly rising as kids, 
     sometimes as young as twelve or thirteen years of age, engage 
     in homicides before they can even shave. One hundred thirty-
     five thousand kids carry guns with them to school and 
     countless others stay home out of fear of what may happen 
     going to, in, and coming home from their schools. Homicide is 
     the second leading cause of death of people between fifteen 
     and thirty-four in this country and it is the leading cause 
     of death for black males in the same age group.
       The carnage would not be possible without the easy 
     availability of guns. Between seventy and eighty percent of 
     all murders are committed by gunfire. These statistics don't 
     even take into account the sixty-five thousand other people 
     who are shot each year but survive due to the extraordinary 
     talents of trauma surgeons in the big cities.
       The Brady Bill just won't do and it promises far more than 
     it can deliver even though it's an important first step. The 
     Brady Bill contains no penalties for states who don't abide 
     by the five-day waiting period and the background check, and 
     Washington has not allocated one dime to implement it. While 
     the Brady Bill was being debated, hundreds of thousands of 
     Americans bought more guns--just in case.
       We must take bolder steps in stopping the manufacture, sale 
     and importation of guns and ammunition. With over two hundred 
     million guns already in circulation, this should cause little 
     inconvenience to anyone. . .
       [Also], whole categories of criminal conduct have been 
     decriminalized by the simple expedient of having Federal 
     Court impose mandated prison caps on prison admissions. 
     Thousands and thousands of prisoners have been allowed out of 
     our prisons to return to the streets to once again prey upon 
     a fearful community in which law-abiding citizens are held 
     hostage and locked in their homes. Citizens who have banded 
     together in town watches, and victim groups and church groups 
     whose neighborhoods have been laid waste by these marauding 
     criminals feel anger, frustration, betrayal and defeat that 
     their efforts at securing a safe environment for themselves 
     and their children have been turned aside by courts. Because 
     of this disastrous prison cap, recidivism is assured and 
     there are fifty thousand cases, in Philadelphia alone, where 
     victims will never have their day in court [and] have justice 
     done for them because the criminals fail to appear in 
     court.
       What makes it worse is that virtually no one is looking for 
     these defendants and, by the time someone finds them, they'll 
     be released again because of the cap or because the witnesses 
     and victims will have given up coming to court. The court 
     system has, in effect, granted amnesty to untold numbers of 
     thieves, burglars, robbers, muggers and drug dealers all 
     because the jail is overcrowded.
       Why do we wonder, when we try to report a theft or a 
     burglary, that the officer who takes our phone call tells us 
     to call our insurance company or that the cops drive by open-
     air drug markets or prostitutes and don't even try to stop 
     the illicit activity--it's because they know that they'll 
     still be doing the paperwork long after the criminal they've 
     locked up is released with no bail, and won't show up for 
     court because of prison overcrowding. Our quality of life, 
     our safety and, sometimes, our lives may all be expendable 
     because a judge believes the prisoner is uncomfortable.
       I am a humane person. I don't believe in cruel and inhuman 
     prisons but this can't go on.
       Perhaps Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York said it 
     best when he said that we have tolerated deviant behavior 
     beyond the levels that communities can afford to recognize 
     and that we've been defining deviancy downward, accepting 
     conduct that was previously stigmatized and we've raised to 
     ``normal'' behavior which, by any prior standard, would have 
     been abnormal.
       What Senator Moynihan is really saying is that we've 
     hoisted the white flag and just given up.
       When people have lamented to me over the past years that 
     our court system did not seem to be working for them, they 
     were closer to the truth than they realized.
       We must make mental health commitment easier to obtain and 
     treatment readily available, even if, in some cases, it has 
     to be done involuntarily. There is no point to offering 
     treatment only after a sick person has committed a crime and 
     has been sent to prison.
       Within the next several weeks, I'll be seeking to introduce 
     into the legislature new laws to stop what one writer called 
     the judicial recycling of thugs.
       Mandatory sentencing have been enacted in response to 
     judges who just won't put people in prison when they deserve 
     it. I'll be proposing that a defendant who is convicted of a 
     crime while on probation will not be able to serve the old 
     sentence and his new sentence concurrently so that judges 
     will be required to make defendants serve these sentences one 
     after the other, instead of at the same time as is now the 
     usual practice. There is simply no excuse for allowing repeat 
     criminals to get two crimes for the price of one at our 
     expense.
       I will be supporting a version of H.B. 2313, which is 
     commonly called a three times and you're out statute, which 
     will mandate as much as life imprisonment for these felons 
     who have been convicted three times for any one or 
     combination of certain enumerated violent crimes. . .
       Eighty percent of our incoming adult prisoners are addicted 
     to drugs and there is no treatment protocol or program 
     available in or adjacent to our prisons. Contact visitors, 
     and corrupt employees, or others, smuggle drugs into the 
     prisons virtually at will. If we are serious about combatting 
     the disastrous effect of drugs, which is directly related to 
     our shocking crime rate, we must have as part of our court 
     and corrections system a comprehensive drug screening and 
     treatment program.
       We have already begun the planning of this initiative with 
     Judge Legrome Davis and we have pledged to work with all 
     parties in the court system to make realistic drug treatment 
     programs part of our correction programs. These programs are 
     not an alternative to incarceration where incarceration is 
     the correct sentence, but will be an integral part of 
     incarceration, a parole or probation plan, and so forth.
       Lastly, we will continue our efforts with even greater 
     fervor in the area of community-based crime prevention 
     efforts such as our Public Nuisance Task Force, headed by 
     David Castro, and Urban Genesis, the 501c(3) corporation 
     which is the first non-profit corp. of its kind in the 
     nation.
       After all, even a long sentence handed out to someone who 
     has beaten you over the head won't make your head stop 
     hurting and, truth to tell, it may not even prevent the same 
     criminal from coming out and doing it to someone else, but a 
     prosecutor's office, which works with the many community 
     groups and church groups, to prevent your head from ever 
     being hit--in the first place--now, that's doing something 
     about crime which is really important.
       Haven't we Americans proved to ourselves that, if we put 
     our minds and hearts into something, we can make change 
     happen.

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