[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 89 (Tuesday, July 12, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: July 12, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                                 CRIME

  Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, an American is murdered every 21 minutes, 
raped every 5 minutes, robbed every 46 seconds, assaulted every 29 
seconds.
  Each day, 14 Americans are murdered, 48 are raped, 578 are robbed, 
all by criminals who were arrested, convicted, sent to prison, and 
somehow released to our streets, the beneficiaries of liberal parole 
and probation policies. Despite all this carnage, Congress continues to 
dawdle, failing to pass a crime bill because of differences over the 
so-called Racial Justice Act.
  Unbelievably--and I underscore this--unbelievably, neither President 
Clinton nor his Attorney General, Janet Reno, has taken a position on 
the act. Both are officially neutral even though the National 
Association of Attorneys General, the National Association of District 
Attorneys, the National Troopers Coalition, and other prominent law 
enforcement groups claim that the act would sound the death knell for 
the death penalty in America. If you support the death penalty, you 
cannot support the Racial Justice Act because the two are mutually 
exclusive.
  Another crucial issue facing the crime conferees is the issue of 
funding. Will the crime bill strike the right balance? Will it devote 
enough resources to incarceration? Or will it opt for the root causes 
approach, pouring billions and billions of dollars into soft-on-crime, 
sixties-style, Great Society programs?
  It appears the crime conferees are trying to resurrect last year's 
defeated stimulus package, disguising a hodgepodge of big dollar 
spending programs under the guise of anticrime legislation: $2 billion 
for something called the Local Partnership Act, whose funding formula 
happens to favor cities with high tax rates. So if you are a mayor in 
some city trying to keep taxes down, or members of a city council, you 
are going to get shortchanged in this formula. Wichita, KS, happens to 
be one which will be shortchanged because they have a lower tax rate 
because they try to run their city as they should.
  Forty million dollars for a midnight sports program; $900 million for 
a model intensive grant program; more than $500 million for youth 
employment and skills program; and more than $1 billion for something 
called the ounce of prevention council which is supposed to coordinate 
all the other spending on job placement, recreation and outreach 
programs. In other words, a new program to coordinate programs. Boy, if 
that does not sound like the Federal Government at its best--another 
program, $1 billion, to coordinate all the other programs, and we do 
not know how much they cost.
  Mr. President, on top of all this, add another $1.4 billion for drug 
courts, which are supposed to provide a nonpunitive approach to dealing 
with drug-related crimes. Instead of prison cells, prisoners are 
offered testing, treatment, alternative punishments, and aftercare. 
Unfortunately, participation in the drug court program is not limited 
to first-time, nonviolent offenders. Repeat and violent juvenile 
offenders are welcome.
  Whatever the merits of these so-called prevention programs, the 
bottom line is that incarceration is the most effective crime stopper. 
A violent criminal--let me underscore, I am talking about violent 
criminals and only violent criminals--violent criminals kept behind 
bars cannot harm a single law-abiding citizen anywhere in America. Not 
one.
  That is why the primary focus of this bill should be and must be 
locking up violent criminals and making certain they stay behind bars 
through what we call truth-in-sentencing provisions which passed the 
Senate with an overwhelming majority. A 15-year sentence should mean 
just that: 15 years, not just 5 years, not 10 years, not 3\1/2\ years. 
But truth in sentencing means 15 years if you are given a 15-year 
sentence. In some cases, you might get a little time off.
  If truth in sentencing were a reality, Polly Klaas would still be 
alive today; Michael Jordan's father, Robert Jordan, would still be 
alive today, and Launice Smith, the 4-year-old gunned down in a 
Washington playground last year, would probably still be alive today.
  Why? Because all were murdered by thugs with prior criminal records 
who somehow slipped through the revolving prison door legally and with 
tragic consequences. As the American Legislative Exchange Council 
recently pointed out:

  The single most effective thing the Congress of the United States 
could do this year in any anticrime legislation is to help us build 
enough prison capacity to lock up every violent offender and begin to 
achieve the goals of truth in sentencing * * *. Prisons are the most 
effective instruments of crime prevention that we have in the country. 
At the $13.5 billion authorization level, we can reasonably add 130,000 
prison beds, enough to lock up every violent--

  I want to keep underscoring the word ``violent.'' We are not talking 
about the average run-of-the-mill crime, we are talking about violent 
offenders.

       --and move aggressively throughout the country to begin to 
     reach the goals of truth in sentencing.

  It is still an open question whether the Congress is up to the 
challenge. If the conference report contains the Racial Justice Act, or 
some version of it, or if we put all our money into these pie-in-the-
sky programs, Great Society, new society, warmed-over programs that 
have not accomplished anything but more bureaucracy and dependency, 
then I think all bets are off and all bets should be off.
  If the report comes up short on prison funding and fails to promote 
truth in sentencing, then the American people are going to be the big 
losers and some are going to lose more than you think. Some are going 
to lose their lives, and I think that is fairly important. Some will be 
raped, some will be robbed, some will be mutilated.
  I do not care what survey or where you take the survey, whether it is 
Minnesota, South Carolina, Kansas, California, or New Mexico, No. 1 is 
crime. Crime. Health care generally ranks about fourth or fifth--3 to 6 
percent. And if you ask the American people what is on their mind, it 
is how do we stop crime in my city, or my rural community, or wherever 
it may be. But it is generally about 20, 22, or 24 percent.

                          ____________________