[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 58 (Wednesday, May 7, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H2313-H2333]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF H.R. 3, JUVENILE CRIME CONTROL ACT OF 
                                  1997

  Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I 
call up House Resolution 143 and ask for its immediate consideration.
  The Clerk read the resolution, as follows:

                              H. Res. 143

       Resolved, That at any time after the adoption of this 
     resolution the Speaker may, pursuant to clause 1(b) of rule 
     XXIII, declare the House resolved into the Committee of the 
     Whole House on the state of the Union for consideration of 
     the bill (H.R. 3) to combat violent youth crime and increase 
     accountability for juvenile criminal offenses. The first 
     reading of the bill shall be dispensed

[[Page H2314]]

     with. General debate shall be confined to the bill and shall 
     not exceed one hour equally divided and controlled by the 
     chairman and ranking minority member of the Committee on the 
     Judiciary. After general debate the bill shall be considered 
     for amendment under the five-minute rule. It shall be in 
     order to consider as an original bill for the purpose of 
     amendment under the five-minute rule the amendment in the 
     nature of a substitute recommended by the Committee on the 
     Judiciary now printed in the bill. The committee amendment in 
     the nature of a substitute shall be considered as read. 
     Points of order against the committee amendment in the nature 
     of a substitute for failure to comply with clause 5(a) of 
     rule XXI are waived. No amendment to the committee amendment 
     in the nature of a substitute shall be in order except those 
     printed in the report of the Committee on Rules accompanying 
     this resolution. Each amendment may be considered only in the 
     order printed in the report, may be offered only by a Member 
     designated in the report, shall be considered as read, shall 
     be debatable for the time specified in the report equally 
     divided and controlled by the proponent and an opponent, 
     shall not be subject to amendment except as specified in the 
     report, and shall not be subject to a demand for division of 
     the question in the House or in the Committee of the Whole. 
     The Chairman of the Committee of the Whole may: (1) postpone 
     until a time during further consideration in the Committee of 
     the Whole a request for a recorded vote on any amendment; and 
     (2) reduce to five minutes the minimum time for electronic 
     voting on any postponed question that follows another 
     electronic vote without intervening business, provided that 
     the minimum time for electronic voting on the first in any 
     series of questions shall be fifteen minutes. At the 
     conclusion of consideration of the bill for amendment the 
     Committee shall rise and report the bill to the House with 
     such amendments as may have been adopted. Any Member may 
     demand a separate vote in the House on any amendment adopted 
     in the Committee of the Whole to the bill or to the committee 
     amendment in the nature of a substitute. The previous 
     question shall be considered as ordered on the bill and 
     amendments thereto to final passage without intervening 
     motion except one motion to recommit with or without 
     instructions.

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Bonilla). The gentleman from New York 
[Mr. Solomon] is recognized for 1 hour.
  Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, for purposes of debate only, I yield 30 
minutes time to the gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Moakley], pending 
which I yield myself such time as I might consume. During consideration 
of this resolution, all time yielded is for debate purposes only.
  Mr. Speaker, today in this Nation we are faced with a situation where 
the State and local juvenile justice systems are failing to hold young 
offenders accountable for their criminal activity.
  This rule is designed to give the House a fair and efficient 
procedure for considering legislation to try to attack the problem of 
juvenile crime. This rule does provide 1 hour of general debate on the 
Juvenile Crime Control Act.
  In order to allow consideration of the amendment of the Committee on 
the Judiciary in the nature of a substitute, the rule waives the 
prohibition against appropriating on a legislative bill. There is one 
minor technical provision which does allow unexpended amounts which are 
repaid into a fund to be used for future payments without going through 
the appropriation process. This is what requires the waiver.
  The rule provides that eight specified amendments may be offered on 
the House floor. Of these eight amendments, six are offered by the 
Democrats. This procedure is more than fair to the minority. If 
Republicans had been treated so well when we were in the minority, we 
would have thought we had died and gone to heaven, Mr. Speaker.

                              {time}  1930

  In order to expedite the voting process, the rule provides a vote-
stacking authority to the Chairman of the Committee of the Whole.
  Finally, the rule guarantees the minority one last chance to offer 
its best alternative and a motion to recommit which may certainly 
contain instructions.
  Mr. Speaker, we are going to have to get a little more order, because 
we are coming to a very important part of the debate on this very 
important issue.
  Mr. Speaker, juvenile criminals are a threat to the lawmaking, 
taxpaying citizens of this Nation to an extent that they have never 
been before. In order to demonstrate the extent of the problem we are 
dealing with, let me just provide my colleagues with some very 
startling facts, and these are really startling.
  For example, only 10 percent of violent juvenile offenders, now that 
is violent juvenile offenders, those that commit things like murder and 
rape and robbery and assault, 10 percent of them receive any sort of 
prison confinement.
  Let me repeat that one more time. Only 10 percent of violent juvenile 
offenders that commit murder and rape and robbery and assault receive 
any kind of jail time at all.
  Many juveniles receive no punishment at all. Almost 40 percent of 
violent juvenile offenders who come into contact with the justice 
system have their cases dismissed, 40 percent of them with these very 
serious crimes.
  In many cases, by the time the courts finally lock up an older 
teenager on a violent crime charge, that offender has a long list of 
violations with arrests starting way back in the early years. According 
to the Justice Department numbers, 43 percent of juveniles in State 
institutions had more than 5 prior arrests and 20 percent had been 
arrested more than 10 times. Approximately 80 percent of those 
offenders had previously been on probation.
  When encounters with the juvenile justice system teach juvenile 
offenders that they are not accountable for their wrongdoing, I say to 
my colleagues, the system has to be broken.
  In America today no population poses a greater threat to public 
safety than the juvenile criminals who are back out on the street 
before they even serve any jail time. Teenagers account for the largest 
portion of all violent crime in America. Older teenagers, ages 17 and 
19, are the most violent of all age groups. More murder and robbery is 
committed by 18-year-old males than any other group, and more than one-
third of all murders are committed by offenders under the age of 21.
  The number of juveniles arrested for weapons offenses has more than 
doubled in the last 10 years. Between 1965 and 1992 the number of 12-
year-olds arrested for violent crimes rose 211 percent, the number of 
13 and 14-year-olds rose 301 percent, and the number of 15-year-olds 
rose 297 percent.
  I say to my colleagues, something is wrong; this system is broken. 
What should give us the greatest concern of all is that this dramatic 
increase in youth crime has occurred in the midst of declining youth 
population in this country. In other words, while youth population is 
declining, juvenile crime is escalating at an alarming rate.
  While it is true that the Federal Government does not have 
jurisdiction over the great majority of juvenile crime, Federal law 
does provide an important model for the States. The Federal Government 
also can provide assistance to States and localities in their efforts 
to combat juvenile crime.
  The legislation made in order by this rule, the Juvenile Crime 
Control Act, is designed to provide the necessary leadership and 
assistance, and I would ask for a ``yes'' vote on this rule and on the 
legislation that it makes in order.
  Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
  Mr. MOAKLEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New York [Mr. 
Solomon], my colleague and my dear friend, for yielding me the 
customary half-hour, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong opposition to this rule. Juvenile 
crime is a very serious issue for which a lot of people have solutions, 
and unfortunately this closed rule will allow very few of those good 
ideas to come to this floor.
  Mr. Speaker, in the last 10 years the juvenile crime rate has 
increased 28 percent. Juvenile crime has become a very serious problem, 
and we do not have to look far to find it. Within the last year, 7 
youngsters have been murdered in a rash of brutal gang violence in the 
Benning Road area of Washington, DC. Mr. Speaker, Benning Road is not 
Timbuktu; Benning Road is 10 minutes from this very building.
  Nationwide it is not much different, either. Everyday 5,711 juveniles 
are arrested in the United States. A young man in Los Angeles was 
recently arrested for vandalism. He fancied himself as a graffiti 
artist and was charged $99,000 in restitution. He said, ``That's what I 
like to do, and I'm going to do it no matter what.''
  Mr. Speaker, these days more and more people care less and less about

[[Page H2315]]

the consequences of their actions, whether it is gang killings, 
robberies, violent crimes, or graffiti, and we need to do something 
about it.
  Mr. Speaker, we must do everything we possibly can to make sure that 
our children do not turn to crime, but I do not believe that this bill 
does what it should. I do not believe this bill is anywhere near 
perfect, and I do not believe Members who want to change parts of this 
bill should be prevented from doing so.
  Sixteen germane Democratic amendments were offered and only 5 
accepted. The Republican bill we are considering today makes a few good 
steps but, Mr. Speaker, it stops at the jailhouse door. This bill locks 
kids up and throws away the key. If a child is 13 or older, Mr. 
Speaker, if a child is 13 or older, he or she can end up in prison not 
with other juveniles but with adults.
  Mr. Speaker, this is the most horrible idea that I have heard in a 
long while. Young people should be held responsible for their actions, 
but we can help them change before it is too late, because for many 
juveniles it is really not too late. Ninety-four percent of all 
juvenile arrests are for nonviolent offenses. These children can be 
changed before they turn to worse offenses.

  However, for many of the inmates in the adult jails, the time for 
change is long gone. These people in the best cases will teach the 
young people new tricks, and in worst cases they will prey upon them, 
and in some particularly tragic cases they will kill them.
  This is no way to turn a young person's life around. In fact, 
statistics show that if we try a juvenile as an adult, the crime rate 
will escalate.
  Furthermore, this bill also does absolutely nothing to stem the high 
number of juvenile crimes and accidents involving handguns. It does not 
take the very simple and the very effective step of requiring guns to 
have child safety locks so that if a child picks up the parent's gun, 
they cannot hurt themselves or anyone else.
  We on the Democratic side offered an amendment to require gun 
manufacturers to have safety locks. It was defeated on a party line 
vote.
  Mr. Speaker, I believe we owe our children to steer them in the right 
direction before they get in trouble. I do not believe that kids are 
born bad. I believe they are made bad by absent parents, by abusive 
environments, and by drug pushers. We need to give these kids a chance 
to be good. We need to give local police the ability to stop the sale 
of illegal guns and drugs to these children. We need to intervene 
early, at the first signs of trouble, and we need to support community 
initiatives for after-school activities and mentoring programs.
  Mr. Speaker, these programs work. They provide positive role models 
and the children respond. They provide positive incentives and the 
children respond, and they provide a chance, and Mr. Speaker, the 
children respond.
  I know it may not sound tough; I know it is becoming fashionable to 
punish, punish, and punish, but I, for one, would much rather see a 
young person playing basketball at midnight than scared for his life in 
some dangerous adult prison.
  Mr. Speaker, juvenile crime is not hopeless and neither are these 
children. In my home city of Boston, we have just seen how successful 
prevention efforts can be. Three years ago our juvenile firearm 
homicide rate was 16 percent. Last year, the Boston police department 
lowered our juvenile firearm homicide rate to zero. That means that not 
one young person was killed last year in a city of about 600,000 
people. That is progress.
  The city of Boston uses strong community policing programs and 
programs like Operation Cease Fire, which uses shared intelligence to 
suppress violent flare-ups quickly. However, even in Boston we have a 
long way to go. Juvenile murders may be down, but juvenile drug use is 
up.
  We should be giving youngsters something positive to do after school, 
and putting child safety locks on guns would go a long way to reducing 
violent crimes. Unfortunately, this will not happen under this bill, 
but it should. Mr. Speaker, whether it is the housing projects in 
Boston, Detroit, Southeast Washington, we owe to our children to help 
them back on the right path before they grow up. We need to enforce the 
law, intervene when children first start acting up and prevent young 
people from turning to crime in the first place.
  Juvenile justice should be rehabilitative, not punitive. So I urge my 
colleagues to defeat this rule, and if it is not defeated, to join the 
International Union of Police Associations and the International 
Brotherhood of Police Officers and support the Democratic Juvenile 
Control and Prevention Act.
  Mr. Speaker, let us not give up on our children before it is too 
late.
  Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished 
gentleman from Sanibel, FL [Mr. Goss].
  (Mr. GOSS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his 
remarks.)
  Mr. GOSS. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from New York, the 
distinguished chairman of the Committee on Rules, [Mr. Solomon] for 
this time. I rise today in very strong support of this rule. It will 
allow fair consideration of the Juvenile Crime Control Act of 1997.
  We have been able to accommodate the minority, allowing votes on five 
Democratic amendments, including a full substitute. In addition, of 
course, the House will consider one Republican amendment, and of course 
the minority has the option to offer a motion to recommit. I have every 
confidence that we are going to have a full debate and the minority has 
many avenues to speak.
  This bill has had extensive review, with forums being held throughout 
the country in order to ensure that the measures it takes will 
effectively deal with what is one of the most difficult and troubling 
aspects in our fight against crime today, and that is the aspect of our 
Nation's young people.
  I know, talking to colleagues on the floor and in the cloakrooms and 
around town, that Members are coming to grips with this issue. I 
recently met with the Juvenile Justice Advisory Board in my own 
district in southwest Florida to discuss some of the problems we are 
having. Florida is a pretty progressive State. We do have the 
equivalent of gun lock laws and things like that, good safety issues, 
but we still have an awful lot of youth crime.
  In an honest discussion with both teens and adults on the Juvenile 
Justice Advisory Board, I heard firsthand about a system that is 
failing both troubled children and our society at large. Our juvenile 
justice system fails to respect teens by ignoring or glossing over 
their misdeeds, and this in turn breeds a lack of respect for laws and 
civil society among our teens as well.
  Respect is still part of our vocabulary in this country. We need to 
remember that.

                              {time}  1915

  We need innovative approaches tailored to local needs. I hope this 
bill, by setting a strong example, will spur this kind of change.
  At the national level, according to the Department of Justice, 17- 
and 18-year-olds are the most violent of all age groups. Let me say 
that again. The most violent of all age groups are 17-year-olds and 18-
year-olds. Younger criminals are getting increasingly violent.
  It is long past due that we make juvenile offenders understand there 
are real consequences for criminal behavior. Right now, as Chairman 
Solomon has said not once but twice, and I will say again, only 1 in 10 
violent juvenile offenders receives any confinement. If Members do not 
learn or hear anything else in this debate, remember that statistic. 
Our youngest career criminals are getting away with the most heinous 
crimes over and over again, and it is not just gang warfare. Wake up.
  I am pleased that H.R. 3 will address this by allowing and 
encouraging tough penalties, rather than perpetuating the slap-on-the-
wrist approach.
  I urge my colleagues to support this rule. It will get the debate 
done, and it will get it done fairly. I urge support for this bill. It 
will do something America will be proud of and needs desperately.
  Mr. MOAKLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from 
Oregon [Mr. Blumenauer].
  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time 
to me.
  Mr. Speaker, I strongly urge a no vote on this rule. Every day 1 
million children go home in this country to households with loaded 
guns. Fifty-five

[[Page H2316]]

percent of the guns in this country are loaded, kept in homes. It 
results in the death of approximately 16 children a day, and for every 
child who is killed, there are approximately 5 who are seriously 
wounded.
  If this gun lock proposal would come to the floor, an element that 
both sides of the gun control issue agree upon, which 80 percent of the 
American public support, if the Committee on Rules in their wisdom 
would allow us to bring this before the House, it would overwhelmingly 
pass, and next year at this time there would be dozens of children 
alive, hundreds who would not be wounded, including the accidental 
deaths and use in violent crime.
  I strongly urge a no vote on the rule. Send this back, and allow us 
to give something that all Americans can agree on.
  Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from 
Middleburg, NY, [Mr. Ben Gilman], one of the most effective Members of 
our body and chairman of our Committee on International Relations.
  (Mr. GILMAN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his 
remarks.)
  Mr. GILMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to 
me.
  I am pleased to rise in strong support of the rule, H.R. 3, the 
Juvenile Crime Control Act, legislation which helps address a multitude 
of problems facing our Nation's juvenile court system. We have 
witnessed a doubling in drug use among teenagers every year since 1993. 
At the same time there has been a steady decrease in the numbers of 
young people who view the dangers of drug use as any serious, 
legitimate problem.
  That softening of attitude toward drugs and the increased abuse of 
substances are major factors in the subsequent rise in the crime rate 
of those under the age of 18. In fact, just last Sunday, on ABC's 
``Meet the Press,'' FBI Director Louis Freeh stated that the central 
problem that fuels violence, particularly juvenile violence, is drug 
use, drug selling, drug dealing, and drug trafficking.
  For the past several years law enforcement agencies have attempted to 
meet the challenge posed by the rise in juvenile crime, and especially 
in violent crime. Regrettably, our police and prosecutors are hampered 
by a system which restricts information sharing and discourages serious 
punishment. This legislation moves to correct those shortfalls.
  There are those who would say this bill focuses too much on 
punishment and not enough on prevention. I have long been a believer in 
prevention programs as a method for deterring youth crime. However, I 
do believe that once an individual has committed a violent felony, it 
is often too late for prevention.
  Mr. Speaker, prevention has its place. Yet, I submit that it has no 
place with those who have decided to forgo alternate routes but instead 
focus on a life of violent crime. Those criminals should face 
punishment and accountability for their actions, not excuses offered by 
their apologists, who are more interested in advancing some social 
theory than protecting the law-abiding community.
  Accordingly, I ask our colleagues to join in supporting this 
legislation which moves to address the growing problem of violent youth 
crime.
  Mr. MOAKLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from 
California [Ms. Lofgren].
  Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this rule. 
Mr. Speaker, last week we had an open rule on patents. That is an 
important issue. Today we had an open rule on endangered species and 
flooding. My district has flooded three winters in a row. That is an 
important issue. But neither one of these issues rises to the 
importance of juvenile delinquency and the threat it poses for our 
country.
  Mr. Speaker, I think that to have 200 minutes to discuss the issues 
of juvenile delinquency and what as a country we can do about them is 
not appropriate.
  The underlying bill before us takes the $1.5 billion currently slated 
to flow into our States and communities from the Violent Crime trust 
fund and puts it all into a scheme of mandatory trial of teenagers as 
adults. The interesting thing is that from our analysis, arguably only 
12 States are going to even be allowed to apply for the funding because 
the others do not have the scheme required by the act.
  Mr. Speaker, I do not think $1.5 billion for 12 States--and not one 
cent for prevention--is what this country needs to address juvenile 
delinquency. There are certainly young people who need to be tried as 
adults. There are young people who have done horrible things. But we 
know that doing nothing but punishment will not solve our problem.
  My friend Mark Klaas, whose wonderful daughter was murdered, said 
something along these lines: ``To say that we are curing crime with 
prisons is kind of like saying we are going to cure disease by building 
cemeteries.'' It is too late to deal with the problem only after the 
fact. We need to lend our efforts to preventing crime as well.
  We also need to have all of the energies and all of the thoughts of 
every Member of this body, not just one party line vote. We need to 
have rigorous debate, not 200 minutes. I would urge a no vote on the 
rule.
  Mr. MOAKLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from 
Rhode Island [Mr. Kennedy].
  Mr. KENNEDY of Rhode Island. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in opposition 
to the Republican rule and the McCollum bill. There is no question that 
we have to get tough on juvenile crime. Everyone in today's Chamber 
agrees on that issue. The debate is, how are we going to do that, and 
how serious are we going to be about stopping juvenile crime.
  The rule that we have before us prevents the true debate from ever 
taking place, the true debate that must take place on how to get 
juvenile justice.
  With this closed rule, the Republicans prove that they do not want to 
hear the truth about this issue. They do not want to hear the facts. 
Here are the facts. The facts show that kids sentenced to adult 
facilities have higher recidivism rates than kids punished in the 
juvenile system. Listen to that. What the Republicans want to do is 
seek a solution that worsens the problem and does not improve the 
situation.
  Fact two: Facts show that kids face shorter, I repeat, shorter and 
easier sentences in the adult system than they would under the juvenile 
court judges. It makes perfect sense. You have a teenager in front of 
you versus a hardened criminal 30 years, 40 years old. If you are the 
judge and you have overcrowding, who are you going to sentence?
  The fact of the matter is and the statistics, let me repeat, the 
statistics prove this, that the kids that are violent criminals get 
less time, which I do not think is what the gentleman wants to do, but 
which he ends up advocating for in supporting the Republican bill.
  Finally, Mr. Speaker, I think we need to get beyond the myths of this 
and we need to get to the facts. That is what we are not going to get 
to under this Republican closed rule because it will not give us the 
adequate time to debate this issue.
  Finally, Mr. Speaker, let me say how disturbed I am that we are not 
even going to include a child lock safety device with the purchase of 
firearms. It is, to me, shameful in this country, when we have 16 kids 
getting killed every day, that the Republican bill has no provision for 
a child safety lock to be sold with guns. That is another reason to 
vote against this rule.
  Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
  Mr. Speaker, I would just say to my good friend, the gentleman from 
Rhode Island [Mr. Kennedy] that if he examines the rule, that almost 
all of the time is allocated to the Democratic Party. All of the 
amendments that were made in order were mostly Democrat. I think there 
was one Republican. We cannot be any more fair than that.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman 
from Florida [Mr. Bill McCollum], one of the most respected Members of 
this body when it comes to these kinds of issues. He is a member of the 
Committee on the Judiciary.
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Speaker, I just want to address under this rule for 
1 minute what the purpose of this legislation is all about today, 
because there are some misperceptions about it.
  The reason why this legislation is out here is because the juvenile 
justice system of the Nation is broken. This is primarily a State and 
local matter in the sense that most juveniles are tried

[[Page H2317]]

in State and local courts. There are only about 300 a year that are 
tried in Federal court. Usually those are for peculiar reasons of where 
the crimes are committed, Indian reservations, et cetera.
  The problem we face is that roughly one-fifth of all violent crime in 
this country today is committed by those who are under the age of 18. 
That is 1 out of every 5 murders, rapes, armed robberies, assaults, et 
cetera.
  This is a shocking number in and of itself, but when we consider the 
fact that the majority, the highest number or percentage of any group 
that commits murder in this country are 18-year-olds, the largest 
number of any age group that commits rapes are 17-year-olds, that 64 
percent of all violent juvenile crime is committed by those under the 
age of 15, and then we see that in the juvenile justice system, of 
those who are found and adjudicated of having been guilty of a serious 
violent crime, only about 10 percent are ever incarcerated in any kind 
of an institution, juvenile detention facility or otherwise. It is 
remarkable. The average length of stay for those that are is less than 
1 year. I think that is a serious problem.
  Even more serious is the fact that when we look at the juvenile 
justice system for the early delinquencies, where we really ought to be 
addressing this problem for vandalizing a home or a store, running over 
a parking meter, doing graffiti on the wall of a warehouse, usually law 
officers do not even take these kids before juvenile courts like they 
used to. There are no consequences these kids see.
  Juvenile judges, when they do get hold of a youngster for one of 
these kinds of misdemeanor crimes, usually it is 10 or 12 times before 
the juvenile judge on average before there is any kind of a sanction. 
That means community service or restitution or doing whatever we might 
think of as a relatively mild sanction.
  So is it any wonder in a system like this that when somebody gets to 
be 16 years old, has a long list of doing these offenses, that when 
they get a gun in their hands they do not hesitate to pull the trigger 
because they do not think there are going to be any consequences to 
doing it?
  This bill is about repairing the juvenile justice system and putting 
consequences back in there. It does in it in two ways. One, it provides 
for a model Federal system for those limited number of juveniles who 
come into contact with the Federal system. Two, it provides $1.5 
billion over 3 years, $550 million a year in grants, incentive grants 
to the States and local communities to spend as they see fit, 
generally, on fighting juvenile crime.
  It provides just simply four basic qualifiers to get this money, 
because we want the States to take action and change the way they are 
behaving with respect to juvenile justice.
  It requires that they have a sanction of some sort for the very first 
delinquent act of a juvenile delinquent, and graduated sanctions for 
every delinquent act that is more serious than the first one 
thereafter.
  It would require that prosecutors at the State level be given the 
discretion to prosecute, it does not require they do so, those of 15 
years of age or older who commit serious violent crimes, and we are 
talking about murder, robbery, rape, that sort of thing.
  It would require that for those who have committed at least one 
lesser offense, for the second one, and they commit a felony, the 
records be kept on them. Third, it requires parents to have some 
accountability for not the juvenile acts, but for whatever the juvenile 
judge designates them to.

                              {time}  1930

  This bill does not contain prevention provisions in the sense that 
traditionally we think of them before we come in contact with the 
juvenile justice system, because we have two other bills where we deal 
with that. One will be out here in about a month on the Office of 
Juvenile Justice Delinquent Prevention from the Committee on Education 
and the Workforce. That deals with $150 million in prevention grant 
programs. It is a traditional area we need to work on, and we all are 
interested in that.
  It also is true that we are going to have an effort to reauthorize or 
authorize and have appropriated about $500 million again this year for 
the general crime prevention block grant program that we instituted 
last year to go to the cities and the counties to fight crime as they 
see fit which, of course, includes fighting juvenile crime.
  So there are going to be a lot of prevention programs funded out here 
on other bills before one comes in contact with the juvenile justice 
system.
  This bill tonight is designed to repair a broken juvenile justice 
system. That is the single most important prevention thing right now 
that I can think of that we can do, even though there are other matters 
that need to be dealt with when it comes to juvenile crime. That is 
what this bill is about, not about anything else. It is very narrowly 
focused, designed to repair the Nation's broken juvenile justice system 
that is not working today, to get more funds, more probation officers, 
more judges, more detention facilities, and to get sanctions started 
for the early juvenile delinquent acts.
  Mr. MOAKLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman 
from New York [Mrs. McCarthy].
  Mrs. McCARTHY of New York. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the 
rule.
  The rule to H.R. 3, the Juvenile Crime Control Act of 1997, does not 
allow Members to engage in a full and fair debate about reducing 
juvenile crime and making our schools safe. The closed rule denies 
Congress the opportunity to discuss child safety lock legislation. 
Child safety locks can help make our schools and our streets safer for 
our children. The loaded and unlocked guns are being taken from our 
homes continuously and used to commit juvenile crimes in our schools. 
Failure to allow this debate on safety locks is expensive for the 
American people. We in the health care system know that it costs us 
almost $3.5 billion, but, more than that, we are losing our children.
  According to National Safe Kids Campaign Chairman C. Everett Koop, 
locks and load indicators could prevent more than 30 percent of 
unintentional firearm fatalities.
  Child safety locks are not expensive. Child safety locks will reduce 
the cost to the American taxpayers associated with juvenile crime.
  This is not the same old debate about gun control. This is about 
reducing violence and its associated costs.
  The amendment we would like to debate would simply require federally 
licensed firearms dealers to sell child safety locks with firearms. 
Nobody's guns are going to be taken away. There will be no further 
Federal requirements for purchase.
  It is a simple safety lock. We have bills that make it impossible for 
children to get into an aspirin bottle. Do my colleagues not think we 
should do the same thing with a gun?
  Therefore, I urge my colleagues to oppose this rule. Let us try and 
save some kids these days.
  Mr. MOAKLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New 
York [Mr. Schumer], a fighter for gun control.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. Speaker, I thank our ranking member of the Committee 
on Rules for his generous cession of time.
  Whatever we think of the bill that is before us, and there are a lot 
of opinions, the rule proves one thing: The Republican leadership is 
scared of the NRA. We already know the Republican Party opposes 
reasonable measures against gun violence, but now they are saying we 
cannot even talk about it.
  The Republicans want to make guns a four-letter word on the House 
floor, no discussion allowed. Their whole legislative strategy is built 
around a single objective of preventing the House from even voting on 
gun safety measures. When we are talking about youth violence, Mr. 
Speaker, there is nothing more relevant than guns.
  The reason juvenile crime is so much more violent today than ever 
before is because youth gangs are so well armed. Back in the 1960's, 
there was plenty of anxiety and plenty of gangs and plenty of young men 
on the streets angry, but all they had was their fists and people did 
not come home in coffins and in body bags. Now guns in many of our 
cities are everywhere. We are refusing to even debate that issue.
  Every amendment we have offered to this bill that would deal with the 
underground gun market, a simple trigger lock provision that my 
colleague, the

[[Page H2318]]

gentlewoman from New York, talked about. Or stiff mandatory sentences 
on kingpin gun traffickers, the NRA has always told us punish the 
criminal. These gun traffickers are among our worst criminals, and my 
colleagues would not even allow us to debate it in the bill. Every 
amendment has been ruled not germane. Mr. Speaker, this is a gag rule 
on preventing gun violence. The whole bill has been set up so that gun 
amendments can be kept off on technical grounds.
  Members know we are right about guns, but we are so afraid of the gun 
lobby we will not even put the issue to a vote. That is the true, 
behind-the-scenes story of this bill, that the NRA is writing the 
script.
  The gentleman from Florida, the chairman of the Crime Subcommittee, 
has been working for months on this legislation. He has been very open 
to input from the minority, and for that I thank him. In fact, the 
gentleman from Florida [Mr. McCollum] brought the Committee on Rules a 
manager's amendment that would have added to this bill a whole series 
of provisions proposed by myself, the gentlewoman from New York [Mrs. 
McCarthy] and the administration on guns. But the Republican leadership 
is keeping that manager's amendment out of the bill, an amendment by 
the majority's own subcommittee chairman.
  There is one and only one reason for this, so that the minute anyone 
says the word gun violence, gun control, the Republicans can jump up 
and say, out of order. That is a shabby way to legislate. I urge 
Members to vote against the rule.
  Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
  As I look at this legislation, I just wonder, because there have been 
mentions of some gun lock safety equipment. This bill does not deal 
with gun lock safety. That legislation perhaps could come again at some 
future time.
  I think what we really do need to do is to talk about the 
relationship with the White House. Let us call attention first, I would 
like to call attention to the fact that we Republicans have been in 
office here for about 2 years and 2 months or so, and I wonder where 
all this legislation was prior.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Florida [Mr. McCollum], 
chairman of the subcommittee, to perhaps answer that question of what 
happened to the manager's amendment and the relationship with the White 
House.
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Speaker, I would like to make a comment. I think 
that there is an explanation in order. I had offered a manager's 
amendment yesterday including a number of things before the Committee 
on Rules that are in the President's bill that are perfectly acceptable 
and I think ultimately should be passed into law, including enhanced 
penalties for those who are trafficking in guns with juveniles or 
juveniles who commit violent crime with a gun and so on. But the truth 
of the matter is that we were in negotiations with the administration, 
the leadership, my leadership, all through the day yesterday and even 
today attempting to come to some accommodation around the edges with 
respect to these matters, and they were apparently unsuccessful.
  I was not involved in all of those, but I know that they were going 
on at the highest level. I think those negotiations will continue and 
that ultimately we will have a lot of these provisions that we can pass 
out here on the floor. But they are not part of this bill. I would like 
to have been able to put them in there. It would be nice to pass it all 
at one time. But we will have other opportunities and other days to do 
this. Today is not the only day.
  What we are focusing on today and tomorrow is repairing a broken 
juvenile justice system. That is the highest priority. We should not 
diminish its importance. I think my colleagues on both sides of the 
aisle should recognize that fact, argue if they want about what maybe 
else we should do in addition to this, understand there is nothing more 
important to fighting violent juvenile crime or juvenile crime at all 
than repairing the Nation's collapsing juvenile justice system and 
putting what is necessary in there to get sanctions back into the 
system for those early delinquents acts so that we can get consequences 
and that kids understand there will are consequences for their juvenile 
acts. I think that is very, very important.
  Mr. MOAKLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 15 seconds to the gentleman from 
New York [Mr. Schumer].
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. Speaker, would the gentleman from New York, my 
colleague, chairman of the Committee on Rules, answer a question?
  The gentleman said maybe some other time we can bring the trigger-
lock legislation to the floor. Will the gentleman give us a commitment 
that we will bring that legislation to the floor at some point before 
this legislative year is out?
  Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. SCHUMER. I yield to the gentleman from New York.
  Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is a member of the Committee 
on the Judiciary, is he not?
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. Speaker, I am.
  Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, that is the committee. I suggest the 
gentleman take it up with his committee.
  Mr. SCHUMER. So the answer is, the gentleman will not give us a 
commitment.
  Mr. MOAKLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from 
North Carolina [Mr. Watt].
  Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, guess which State in the 
Union has the most aggressive juvenile justice laws? The State of North 
Carolina. If we measure it based on who tries and convicts more 
juveniles as adults, it is North Carolina. One-fifth of the juveniles 
tried, convicted, and sentenced as adults are in North Carolina.
  The Republicans talk about do the adult crime, serve the adult time. 
We do it in North Carolina. But guess what? Under this bill, North 
Carolina would not qualify for funds under this bill. They say they 
want us to be aggressive, lock them up. But, no, they will not give us 
any funds under this bill. In fact, of all the 50 States, 39--at 
least--of the States do not qualify for funds under this bill, 
including North Carolina, which has the most aggressive laws.
  Now, why? Because in North Carolina the judge decides whether 
somebody is going to be tried as an adult rather than the prosecutor 
deciding, and the Federal Government under this bill would require that 
the prosecutor make that decision rather than the judge making that 
decision. So we are going to be deprived of funds unless we change our 
laws to comply with the Federal law.
  Does that make any sense? What we have found out is that one of the 
few States under this bill that would qualify is the State of Florida, 
which is the State of the sponsor of this bill. In fact, once we keep 
investigating, we may find that the only State in the Union that will 
qualify for funds under this bill is the State of Florida, the State of 
the gentleman from Florida [Mr. McCollum].
  What everybody ought to be asking themselves is, does my State get 
anything under this bill? The answer is going to be no for at least 39 
out of the 50 States. We ought to reject this bill. Reject the rule. 
Send it back and let us do something worthwhile.
  Mr. MOAKLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from 
Massachusetts [Mr. Delahunt], a gentleman who has dealt with teenage 
juvenile delinquency for some 21 years and has compiled an outstanding 
record, and is now serving in Congress with us.
  Mr. DELAHUNT. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this rule for very 
similar reasons that were just articulated so eloquently by the 
gentleman from North Carolina. This rule denies the House the 
opportunity to vote on an amendment that I had intended to offer, that 
I had tried to offer which would have ensured that every State, every 
city, every town, and every county would be eligible to access the $1.5 
billion authorized in this bill. It is important to understand that the 
bill before us, as others have articulated, imposes conditions on State 
and local governments--mandates, if you will--before they even have a 
chance to file an application to access that $1.5 billion.
  In fact, to qualify just to access the $1.5 billion, approximately 40 
States would be forced to legislate massive changes in how they deal 
with juvenile offenders.

[[Page H2319]]

                              {time}  1945

  They would be compelled to enact laws that have not been proven to be 
effective and, in my opinion, will actually increase crime by sending 
kids to graduate schools for crime, and it does not make any sense.
  We should know that only 12 States can even file an application under 
the terms of this bill, and it is unclear whether even all of them 
would qualify. Once again we have Washington telling the States and 
local governments what to do. Washington has the answers. Well, 
Washington does not have the answers. The State and local governments 
do.
  As my friend from Massachusetts, Mr. Moakley, stated in his opening 
remarks, the city of Boston has not had a single juvenile murder since 
July 1995, almost 2 years. They instituted a plan, a local plan, that 
combined prevention, intervention, prosecution, and treatment. They 
knew what they were doing. They did not need Washington to tell them 
what to do. Yet under this bill Boston would not qualify for funding 
despite those remarkable results. That does not make sense to me, but 
Washington knows best.
  If those from California, those from Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Texas, 
or Illinois, just to name a few, want to access some of these Federal 
dollars to try the Boston approach, they cannot do so because their 
laws do not meet the conditions in this bill. But again, Washington 
knows best.
  The reality is that Washington cannot know best because there is no 
Federal experience in this area, no Federal juvenile justice system, no 
courts, no judges, no detention centers, no probation departments. In 
fact, as the primary sponsor indicated, there are fewer than 200 
juveniles currently serving Federal sentences, compared with the 
300,000 juvenile offenders locked up in State juvenile facilities.
  Given those facts, we have no business imposing national standards on 
the States and localities that are working to solve the problem of 
juvenile justice. Let us help them, not tell them what to do.
  Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman 
from Bolivar, MO, Mr. Roy Blunt, one of the outstanding new Members in 
this body.
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. BLUNT. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me 
for the moment.
  I just want to respond to the fact that nobody expects this bill to 
be something that every State or maybe any State qualifies for right 
now. The whole purpose is for incentive grants.
  The idea is to get the juvenile justice system in this country going 
again. No State has to do anything under this bill. There is no mandate 
in here. But if the States want the money, then they will have to at 
least demonstrate that they are punishing, sanctioning with some 
sanction, for the very first juvenile delinquent act and every one 
thereafter.
  Then once they get the money, they can spend it as they want to fight 
juvenile crime. But that is the idea.
  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I rise in support of the 
rule, I rise in support of this concept. Normally, I would be on the 
side of my friend from Massachusetts on this issue, because I think 
these are issues that are generally best left to the States.
  But I think, clearly, juvenile crime has exceeded the bounds of the 
States. It is clearly an interstate problem. It is clearly a problem 
that trafficks easily from one State to another.
  I also disagree with the idea that this puts juvenile criminals in a 
graduate school for crime. They have already been in a graduate school 
for crime. We call that graduate school for crime gangs.
  Now, this is not about Dennis the Menace. This is not about somebody 
violating a few rules. This is not about Dennis the Menace; it is about 
Billy the Kid. And I think we need to stop Billy the Kid. I think we 
need to stop that pattern where actually, in gangs, they turn to the 
young gang members and tell them to commit the crime because they are 
not going to have to face the penalty.
  This is something that States will benefit from. States like Missouri 
and Massachusetts and North Carolina can meet the requirements of the 
bill and can qualify.
  Mr. DELAHUNT. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. BLUNT. I yield to my fellow freshman, the gentleman from 
Massachusetts.
  Mr. DELAHUNT. Mr. Speaker, I ask my friend from Indiana if he is 
ready and prepared to go back and tell his Governor, to tell his State 
legislature that we have the answers here in Washington and they cannot 
be resolved by the State of Indiana and by the communities in Indiana? 
Is that what the gentleman is suggesting to me?
  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. Speaker, I would say to the gentleman that, being from 
Missouri, I would be glad to tell the Governor of Indiana that, but I 
will also tell the Governor of Missouri that.
  I think this is a problem that, as we have seen crime decline all 
over the country in total statistics, we have seen juvenile crime rise 
rapidly.
  Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from 
California, Mr. Duke Cunningham, a very respected Member of this body.
  Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman a moment ago spoke on 
trigger guards, and I understand she had a personal family loss and I 
do not know how I would handle that myself. I would also let the 
gentlewoman know I am a member of the NRA, and that I have trigger 
guards, or my weapons are all in safes and my daughters and my son have 
been taught how to use those in a safe manner.
  In fact, the keys are in a different position, in case one of their 
friends walks in and finds it, so they will not have an accident.
  But I would also advise my friends on the other side to look into 
COSCO, who shipped in 2,000 fully automatic AK-47's. The actual gun 
runners themselves were in the White House and contributed to the DNC; 
Mr. Huang, who contributed and arranged $366,000 for COSCO, a company 
owned by the Communist Chinese.
  I would ask that they look into the M-2's that were going down to 
Mexico to disrupt those elections, so they put leftists in their 
legislature. And do my colleagues know where the AK-47's were impacted 
and headed for in San Francisco, in my State of California? They were 
targeted for the inner city gangs. These are fully automatic weapons, 
which we do not sanction.
  But I would ask for a little bit of clarity when my colleagues point 
fingers. Let us take a look at where the threats are in this country 
and let us try to stop them, but we also need to look inwardly.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. CUNNINGHAM. I yield to the gentleman from New York.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his courtesy, and 
I would make two quick points. On the gentleman's first point, as an 
NRA member, the gentleman has safety provisions on his guns. For 
automobiles we require, and throughout America, that people wear 
seatbelts. There is no difference here. The gentleman is good that he 
does it; other people do not. We can save lives by requiring them.
  Second, on the gentleman's other point on the importation of assault 
weapons, we have tried in this House to get amendments to the floor to 
allow that to happen. Repeatedly, we were not allowed.
  Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I would ask the 
gentleman's help in stopping the Communist Chinese COSCO from taking 
over Long Beach Naval Shipyard.
  Mr. MOAKLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman 
from California [Ms. Millender-McDonald].
  Ms. MILLENDER-McDONALD. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for 
yielding me this time.
  Mr. Speaker, I would say to the gentleman from California [Mr. 
Cunningham] that he should really stop his propaganda on COSCO. He is 
ill-advised, and therefore he should stop that with reference to COSCO 
and Long Beach.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong opposition to the rule on H.R. 3, 
the Juvenile Crime Act of 1997. This closed rule would severely limit 
our ability to offer important amendments to this legislation. I am 
particularly concerned that the rule precludes amendments to protect 
children from the accidental discharge of firearms.

[[Page H2320]]

  As elected Representatives we have an important responsibility to 
advocate for our Nation's children by prohibiting the transfer of a 
firearm without a child safety lock as an integral component.
  Every year hundreds of children between the ages of 1 and 19 are 
killed by the unintentional discharge of handguns. Since 1987, more 
than 4,000 innocent boys and girls have lost their lives through 
unintentional firearm deaths.
  The loss of these young children can be prevented, which is why I 
have authored the Firearm Child Safety Lock Act of 1997. This 
legislation would prohibit any person from transferring or selling a 
firearm in the United States unless there is a child safety lock.
  Further, this legislation would prohibit the transfer or sale of 
firearms by federally licensed dealers and manufacturers unless a child 
safety lock is part of its assembly.
  However, legislation is not enough. Responsible handgun owners should 
child-proof their firearms whether they have children or not. I have 
outlined a number of child-proofing options and would like to submit 
them for the Record.
  The Firearm Child Safety Lock Act of 1997, once enacted, will prevent 
the future loss of lives of our innocent children. These are our 
children, our sons and our daughters, and the future of this country. 
As parents and leaders it is our obligation to protect our children 
from senseless deaths caused by the unintentional discharge of 
firearms.
  This is not gun control, this is a safety measure. If gun owners want 
to be nice people, as stated by the NRA's president, Wayne LaPierre, 
then they would support this amendment and curb the senseless deaths of 
our country's children due to unintentional discharge of firearms. For 
this amendment and other amendments I urge my colleagues to oppose this 
rule.
  Mr. MOAKLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from 
Texas [Ms. Jackson-Lee].
  (Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas asked and was given permission to revise 
and extend her remarks.)
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I am not sure if my good 
friend from California is still on the floor of the House, but it is 
disappointing when my friend from California accuses adults of gun 
running but he wants to lock up the children.
  I rise to oppose this rule because I thought we could come to the 
floor of the House and reasonably look at the statistics on juvenile 
crime and juvenile crime prevention and really respond accordingly. I 
thought, for example, that we would understand that this bill is 
nothing but a punitive bill with no resources to address the questions 
of concern in making sure that we prevent juvenile crime.
  One, we want to expose the records to the public rather than giving 
the records only to school officials and social service agencies. We do 
not want to rehabilitate the child; we want to punish the child so that 
they never have the opportunity to be rehabilitated. We want to house 
children in this bill without looking at the ramifications of housing 
children with adults.
  We had amendments that I offered that were not accepted by the 
Committee on Rules. I am disappointed in that, not because we need to 
discuss more air on the floor of the House, but really what we need to 
do is put a bill together that we can all support.
  Certainly, I think it is very important that even though we all talk 
about we believe in the safety of guns, it does not appear to be 
reasonable that a simple act of having a trigger lock could not be an 
amendment for this particular bill.
  I hope this bill goes off the floor of the House, goes back to being 
addressed and assessed, and realizes that the best thing to do for all 
of us is that helping children should be the key element of juvenile 
law coming out of this Congress. We should, in fact, make sure we do 
not house children with adults, and we should, in fact, make sure that 
we can provide the amount of prevention dollars, and we should protect 
children from the unwarranted use of a gun and protect them from the 
detrimental act of the reckless use of a gun.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak in opposition to the rule on H.R. 3, The 
Juvenile Crime Control Act of 1997. As a member of the Judiciary 
Committee, I have spent a great deal of time over the last 2 months 
analyzing and debating the problem of juvenile crime. I am sure that my 
colleagues on both sides of the aisle would agree with that this is a 
very complex and controversial issue. It is for these reasons that I am 
disturbed that H.R. 3 was not given an open rule.
  There are a number of provisions in H.R. 3 that cause me grave 
concern. In an attempt to remedy some of the more grievous provisions 
in H.R. 3, my colleagues and I offered amendments to the Rules 
Committee. Very few of these amendments--amendments that I believe 
would have garnered great support, support on both sides of the aisle--
were made in order.
  In particular, I am troubled that no amendments were made in order 
addressing the controversial issues of housing juveniles in adult 
prisons and releasing juvenile records to the public. In partnership 
with Mr. Watt, I prepared an amendment addressing the problem of 
housing juveniles with adults. Our amendment required that for States 
and local governments to be eligible to receive grant funds they must 
house juveniles who are tried as adults separately from adult inmates 
in facilities so that they have no contact with adult inmates until 
they reach 18 years of age.
  I also had an amendment which would have ensured that predisposition 
juveniles would have no contact with adults in prison. My amendment did 
not address the juvenile who has been convicted of a violent crime. In 
fact, my amendment attempted to protect those children who have not yet 
even been found guilty from the dangers of housing them with adults. 
Without this amendment there is a very real possibility that an 
innocent child will be mistakenly arrested and suffer in prison in the 
company of adults.
  On any given day approximately 2,400 children are held as juveniles 
in adult jails. Over the course of a year more than 65,000 children are 
held in adult jails.
  Adult jails, however, are very different from facilities designed for 
juveniles. In particular, most adult facilities have inadequate 
rehabilitation programs, health or education programs for juvenile 
offenders. Most juvenile facilities have a full educational program for 
incarcerated youth. Juvenile facilities also have additional programs 
such as exercise and recreation. In contrast, too often, children held 
in adult jails spend all day sitting in their cells.
  Additionally, all available evidence suggests that placing juveniles 
in adult jails places them in very real and very serious danger. They 
are at serious risk for rape, assault, and even murder. A 1989 study by 
Jeffrey Fagan titled ``Youth in Prisons and Training Schools: 
Perceptions and Consequences of the Treatment-Custody Dichotomy'' 
showed that children housed in adult facilities are five times more 
likely to be sexually assaulted, twice as likely to be beaten by staff, 
and 50 percent more likely to be attacked with a weapon than juveniles 
confined in a juvenile facility.
  On April 25, 1996, six adult prisoners murdered a 17-year-old boy 
while he was incarcerated in the juvenile cellblock of an adult jail in 
Ohio.
  In Idaho, a 17-year-old boy held in an adult jail for not paying $73 
in traffic fines was tortured over a 14 hour period and then finally 
murdered by other prisoners in his cell.
  In Ohio, a 15-year-old girl who had never been in trouble before ran 
away from home for 1 night. Although she voluntarily returned to her 
parents, she was put in the county jail by a juvenile court judge ``to 
teach her a lesson.'' On the fourth night of her confinement, she was 
sexually assaulted by a deputy jailer.
  It is already too easy to find examples of children who have been 
assaulted or lost their lives needlessly in adult jails. We have a 
responsibility to act and stop there from being many more.
  A third provision in Mr. McCollum's bill that causes me grave concern 
is that which opens juveniles records to the public. The juvenile 
justice system was founded on the principle that juvenile offenders are 
children and as such should not be held to the same standard of 
culpability as adult offenders. The juvenile justice system has been 
based on the premise of rehabilitation; to provide the juvenile access 
to programs and life skills that he or she has not gained in the 
community. When the juvenile reenters the community he or she is to 
begin fresh without the public stigma of a criminal record.
  H.R. 3, however, requires that in order for States and local 
governments to be eligible to receive grant funds they must maintain 
records for any adjudication of a juvenile who is adjudicated 
delinquent for conduct that if committed by an adult would constitute a 
felony in a records system equivalent to that maintained for adults who 
commit felonies. My amendment would have deleted this requirement for 
both States and local governments and also stated that in the Federal 
system juvenile records would not be available to the public as 
required by H.R. 3. Instead, the

[[Page H2321]]

amendment required that juvenile records be made available only for 
official purposes.
  Like my colleagues, I am very concerned about the rising rate of 
juvenile crime. I agree that to protect the public from certain of 
these juvenile offenders law enforcement officials and certain social 
service organizations must have access to juvenile records. I am 
convinced, however, that publicly disclosing the court records of 
juveniles will permanently stigmatize the child at an early age which 
will follow the child into adulthood; thus, inhibiting efforts to 
rehabilitate the child as well as the child's future employment and 
educational opportunities. It seems to me that to burden an already 
fragile child with this additional handicap is extremely unwise for 
both that child and for society in general.
  I urge my colleagues to vote against this modified close rule and in 
so doing open the debate on juvenile justice to address a number of the 
most concerning provisions of H.R. 3.
  Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman 
from Florida [Mr. McCollum] the distinguished chairman of the 
subcommittee.

                              {time}  2000

  Mr. McCOLLUM. I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.
  Mr. Speaker, I believe tonight as we prepare to vote on this rule, we 
need to understand this whole process in concept and in construct.
  Back a few years ago, we passed some provisions of law here in the 
Federal arena designed to encourage the States to do what we call 
truth-in-sentencing. That is, we found that we have people who commit 
violent crimes that were going through a revolving door and serving 
only about one-third of their sentences. They wound up in that 
situation with a status where they hardly were in before they were out 
in many cases. They went right back on the streets and were committing 
violent crimes. While that was primarily State crimes they were 
committing, we thought an incentive grant program was a good idea and 
we had a pretty overwhelming majority pass a provision that said that 
if States pass laws that will require that repeat violent felons serve 
at least 85 percent of their sentences, then they are going to get a 
very large sum of money from the Federal Government in the form of a 
grant program, to construct more prisons with, to help them in the 
process back home that they need these resources for. We did accomplish 
that.
  In fact, now the national average, because more than 20 States have 
qualified for this money, not many if any qualified at the beginning, 
because more than 20 now have gone out and done it, we see that the 
national average for time served in this country has gone up from a 
third of the sentence to nearly 50 percent of the time in a violent 
offense that is served. It is a model for what we are out here trying 
to do today. We are trying to create another incentive grant to the 
States that says: States, here is money to spend as you want to fight 
violent juvenile crime. You can start at the early levels, do what you 
want to basically with it, more judges, more probation officers or 
whatever, but if you are going to do that, then we expect you to do the 
4 things we think are really critical to reviving the juvenile justice 
system to put consequences back in it again. Because we are seeing law 
enforcement officers not even taking kids before juvenile courts 
because they do not expect them to get any kind of punishment. If a kid 
vandalizes a store or spray-paints a building, should that youngster 
not get some consequences, community service or something for that even 
if it is the first offense? The answer is clearly yes. Because they do 
not get consequences, then that bad behavior is more likely to 
continue. If we do put consequences for those early juvenile delinquent 
crimes, then we are less likely to get more violent crimes from these 
juveniles later on. It is common sense. It is what all juvenile court 
authorities tell us and have told my subcommittee.
  So we have put out a little core group of things to qualify to get 
the money. Then you can spend it as you want to. We are not telling the 
States how to spend the money, but we are telling the States: Here is a 
carrot, here is something like we did with the truth-in-sentencing 
grants, if you do these things, three or four simple things, the 
primary one of which is to start sanctioning the very first delinquent 
act and then have graduated sanctions for every delinquent act 
thereafter, such as community service and so on, then you can get the 
money. And if you have the provision that allows your prosecutor, which 
most States do but not all, allows your prosecutor to try as an adult a 
15-year-old or older who commits a serious violent felony, that is 
important. And, third, we need you to keep records. Records are not 
being kept the way they should be. We do not know how these juveniles 
are doing. If they have committed a felony, that has to be a felony and 
it has to be the second offense. It could have been a misdemeanor 
spray-painting the house or whatever the first time. Only then. But 
then if they do and they have committed a felony, then you have got to 
keep the records and make them available just as you would for adults. 
And you have got to let judges, the judges do not have to do this, you 
have got to let your judges hold parents accountable, not for the 
juvenile delinquent act but when the juvenile delinquent comes before 
them, for that parent to be instructed by the court: Here is what we 
want you to do to oversee your child. If you do not do it, you might 
get a fine or maybe you will do community service. These are the things 
that are broken nationwide. It is a national crisis. We really need to 
do it.
  We are not doing as some on the other side would say, characterizing 
this as telling the States what to do. We are trying to create a 
national interest in this with a little bit of money knowing the States 
have got to come forward with a lot more resources if juvenile judges 
in this country are to do the jobs they all want to do and enough 
probation officers are hired to do it. That is what this is all about.
  There are a lot of other things we have to do. We hope someday that 
families are put back together again. We do not want the situations 
where we have so many single parents out there and no role models. We 
want truancy laws corrected, we want more education for our kids, we 
want to get at the gang problems, we want to do a lot of other things 
we do not do in this bill. There will be other bills, there are going 
to be other bills that address those matters as best we can, though 
many of them frankly have to be addressed in the local communities and 
money is not the answer to all of them. Volunteer time, organization 
and effort is. Yes, there are other things. But tonight the one thing 
we are voting on is a rule that would allow a juvenile justice repair 
bill to go through to provide incentives to the States.
  Mr. MOAKLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the 
gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Pascrell].
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Bonilla). The gentleman from New Jersey 
is recognized for 2\1/2\ minutes.
  Mr. PASCRELL. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts 
for yielding me time on this disappointing rule, on which I rise in 
strong opposition.
  Yes, we need to repair our juvenile justice system, but first we need 
to get our priorities in order and that is what we should be about. I 
speak as a former mayor of a large city and now as a Congressman from 
the Eighth District. While I am pleased that this House is going to 
take a good look at our juvenile justice system and how we can improve 
it, the majority is denying us the opportunity to discuss commonsense 
anti-gun violence efforts as part of this legislation.
  Our priorities should be about those young people who are in the 
galleries listening to us debate this issue, and how we can prevent 
violence from occurring in our streets. Every day American youths are 
injured and killed by guns. A staggering 1 in every 4 teenage deaths 
are gun-related. These numbers do not even take into account the number 
of crimes committed by juveniles with guns. Few factors have had as 
direct an impact on the increase in violent youth crime over the last 
10 years as have guns. Juvenile arrest records for weapons law 
violations are up 103 percent since 1985, a rate that is clearly 
unacceptable to all of us in this room.
  This House is only fooling itself if we believe for a second that we 
can effectively address the issue of youth violence without addressing 
gun violence. If we are truly serious about making our streets and 
neighborhoods safer,

[[Page H2322]]

keeping those young kids safe and alive, we need to get serious and 
have gun violence addressed in this juvenile bill.
  The Democratic substitute that we originally brought to the Committee 
on Rules would have addressed the gun issue. The real losers under this 
rule are the millions of Americans who live in fear of violent youth 
crime, mixed up with gangs and armed to the teeth. The majority is 
keeping us from implementing commonsense rules.
  This is for young people. If we truly love them and wish to protect 
them, then let us put the amendments before this body.


                Announcement By The Speaker Pro Tempore

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair would advise people sitting in the 
gallery that they are prohibited from reacting to speeches on the 
floor.
  Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from New York is recognized 
for 2\1/4\ minutes.
  Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, we have heard a lot of rhetoric here today. 
I think the gentlewoman, I believe it was from Texas, made the 
statement that she was concerned that this bill before us today was 
going to put children in jail. Let me inform the gentlewoman and 
anybody else in this Chamber that for the last 40 years we have coddled 
criminals in this country, and we have made it very, very difficult for 
the people that suffered under those criminals.
  What this legislation does is, yes, it does lock up children. Who are 
those children that we want to lock up under this bill? They are those 
that are old enough to commit murder and rape and brutal assaults 
against women and children in this country. They deserve to be in jail. 
This bill before us is going to send that kind of a message.
  There are a lot of myths about this bill. I will include for the 
Record a list of all of those, there are 10 of them, that explain some 
of the rhetoric that has taken place in this debate.
  In closing, let me just say this. Watch for the vote on final passage 
of this bill and Members will see that all of the talk in opposition to 
it was a lot of rhetoric, because this bill will pass overwhelmingly, 
and will send a message to these young rapists and murderers and brutal 
assaulters of women and children in this country: We are not going to 
stand for it any longer.
  Mr. Speaker, I include the following for the Record:

   Top 10 Democrat Myths About H.R. 3 and the Juvenile Justice System


     MYTH 1: PROSECUTORS WILL BE FORCED TO TRY JUVENILES AS ADULTS

       H.R. 3 mandates that certain juveniles be prosecuted as 
     adults. Federal prosecutors must choose between prosecuting 
     these juveniles as adults or not prosecuting at all.


            FACT. PROSECUTORS HAVE DISCRETION IN EVERY CASE

       H.R. 3 allows prosecutors in every instance to either refer 
     a juvenile offender to State authorities, prosecute the 
     offender as a juvenile, or proceed against the offender as an 
     adult. In the case of murder and other serious violent 
     felonies, H.R. 3 includes a presumption that juvenile 14 or 
     older should be charged as an adult, but the prosecutor has 
     the discretion to charge the offender as a juvenile.


              MYTH 2: JUVENILES WILL BE HOUSED WITH ADULTS

       H.R. 3 will allow the federal government to incarcerate 
     juveniles in the same cell with adult criminals. Moreover, 
     juveniles prosecuted as adults will be housed with adults 
     after they are convicted.


             FACT: JUVENILES WILL NOT BE HOUSED WITH ADULTS

       H.R. 3 explicitly prohibits housing juveniles with adults. 
     There can be absolutely no regular contact between juveniles 
     and adults criminals during any stage of the justice process.


                MYTH 3: ALL PUNISHMENT AND NO PREVENTION

       The Republican approach to addressing the juvenile crime 
     problem is narrow-mined: it focuses solely on punishment and 
     is silent on prevention.


                         FACT: PREVENTION PLUS

       Accountability is prevention: When youthful offenders face 
     consequences for their wrongdoing, criminal careers stop 
     before they start. H.R. 3 encourages states to provide a 
     sanction for every act of wrongdoing, starting with the first 
     offense, and increasing in severity with each subsequent 
     offense, which is the best method for directing youngsters 
     away from a path of crime while they are still amenable to 
     such encouragements.
       Moreover, this bill is only part of a larger legislative 
     effort to combat juvenile crime. The prevention funding in 
     the Administration's juvenile crime bill falls under the 
     jurisdiction of the Committee on Education and the Workforce. 
     That committee will be bringing forth a juvenile crime 
     prevention bill within the next several weeks. In addition, 
     that bill will be a small but significant part of the more 
     than $4 billion dollars which will be spent by the federal 
     government this year on at-risk and delinquent youth.


             MYTH 4: H.R. 3 IS BIG GOVERNMENT AT ITS WORST

       H.R. 3 takes a one-size-fits-all approach by strictly 
     limiting how localities can spend their grant funds.


                FACT: LOCAL GOVERNMENTS HAVE FLEXIBILITY

       Under H.R. 3, States and local governments have extensive 
     flexibility. H.R. 3 provides funds to States and units of 
     local government to be used for a wide variety of juvenile 
     crime-fighting activities ranging from building and expanding 
     juvenile detention facilities, establishing drug courts and 
     hiring prosecutors to establishing accountability-based 
     programs that work with juvenile offenders who are referred 
     by law enforcement agencies.


           MYTH 5: H.R. 3 ATTEMPTS TO MICRO-MANAGE THE STATES

       H.R. 3 sends the message that Washington-knows-best: States 
     must do it the federal government's way or no way. H.R. 3 
     places so many requirements on States in order to receive 
     funding that few States will want to qualify.


         FACT: LIMITED INCENTIVES TO ACHIEVE BENEFICIAL REFORMS

       Creating incentives for the States to reform their juvenile 
     justice systems is desperately needed. When encounters with 
     the juvenile justice system teach juvenile offenders that 
     they are not accountable for their actions, the system is 
     broken. Never before has there been a greater imperative for 
     the juvenile justice system to be working than now. Too many 
     jurisdictions are held captive by bureaucrats that strictly 
     adhere to the old, discredited juvenile justice philosophy 
     that young criminals are not responsible for their actions. 
     Many Republican governors have put forward juvenile justice 
     reform proposals that have been blocked by liberal 
     legislators. Like our truth-in-sentencing incentive grant 
     program, we can help our allies at the State level to 
     transform America's justice system.


            MYTH 6: VERY YOUNG OFFENDERS ARE NOT THE PROBLEM

       H.R. 3 is over-reaching in that it unnecessarily expands 
     the list of serious violent crimes for which 13 year-olds can 
     be prosecuted. There is no evidence which proves that 12-, 
     13-, or 14-year-olds are any more dangerous than they were 
     20 years ago.


                      Fact: Youthful but Dangerous

       Juveniles 15 and younger were responsible for 64 percent of 
     the violent offenses handled by the juvenile courts in 1994. 
     Between 1965 and 1992, the number of 12-year-olds arrested 
     for violent crime rose 211 percent; the number of 13- and 14-
     year-olds rose 301 percent; and the number of 15-year-olds 
     rose 297 percent.


      myth 7: the adult court system is more lenient on juveniles

       Juveniles tried in adult criminal court are more likely to 
     have their cases dismissed and serve shorter sentences than 
     juveniles referred to juvenile court.


     fact: most juveniles are held accountable in the adult system

       According to GAO, most juveniles prosecuted for serious 
     offenses in adult criminal court are convicted and 
     incarcerated. Barely one-third of juveniles prosecuted for 
     serious offenses in juvenile court are convicted and 
     confined. Juveniles prosecuted in criminal court are subject 
     to the same sentencing guidelines as adult defendants in 
     criminal court. While a few studies show that juvenile 
     property offenders may not receive longer sentences in adult 
     court, several studies show that violent juveniles receive 
     longer sentences in adult criminal court than in juvenile 
     court.


  myth 8: violent juveniles are already effectively treated as adults

       Juvenile judges are already waiving large numbers of 
     serious violent juveniles into the adult system, H.R. 3 would 
     limit the power of juvenile judges to make these decisions.


       fact: leaving it up to juvenile judges is not good enough

       In 1994, only 1.4% of all delinquency cases--the same 
     percentage as in 1985--are transferred to adult court. 
     Juvenile court judges transfer just under three percent of 
     violent juvenile offenders to adult criminal court. For 
     juveniles to be held accountable for their violent acts, 
     prosecutors must have a say in this process!


                 myth 9: prevention is research-proven

       The Republican approach to fighting juvenile crime ignores 
     the fact that prevention is cost-effective and research-
     proven. After-school programs and drug treatment programs 
     should be included in H.R. 3 since so little is being done in 
     those areas.


      fact: federally-funded prevention has proven ``ineffective''

       According to a comprehensive Justice Department-
     commissioned study published last month, ``Recreational, 
     enrichment, and leisure activities such as after school 
     programs are unlikely to reduce delinquency'' * * * 
     ``Midnight basketball programs are not likely to reduce 
     crime.'' Programs like it may

[[Page H2323]]

     actually increase the risk of delinquency by combining lower-
     risk and high-risk students in the same activity and by 
     providing space for high-risk youth to interact.
       Moreover, according to the General Accounting Office, the 
     federal government already funds for at-risk and delinquent 
     youth: 21 gang intervention programs, 35 mentoring programs, 
     42 job training assistance programs, 47 counseling programs, 
     44 self-sufficiency programs, and 53 substance abuse 
     intervention programs.


                  myth 10: less confinement, not more

       We need more prevention and alternatives to incarceration 
     not more detention cells. Juveniles need to be diverted away 
     from a life of crime, not thrown in prison in the prime of 
     youth.


                fact: juveniles are not held accountable

       Because our juvenile justice system is so woefully 
     inadequate, juveniles quickly learn, ``I can beat the 
     system.'' Only 10 percent of violent juvenile offenders--
     those who commit murder, rape, robbery or assault--receive 
     any sort of institutional ``placement out-side the home.'' 
     The small percentage of juveniles who are placed in 
     confinement for such violent offenses will be back on the 
     streets in an average of 353 days. Almost half of all 
     juveniles arrested for violent offenses receive probation, 
     fine, restitution, or community service.

  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, and I move the 
previous question on the resolution.
  The previous question was ordered.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the resolution.
  The question was taken; and the Speaker pro tempore announced that 
the ayes appeared to have it.
  Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a 
quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not 
present.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Evidently a quorum is not present.
  The Sergeant at Arms will notify absent Members.
  The vote was taken by electronic device, and there were--yeas 252, 
nays 159, not voting 22, as follows:

                             [Roll No. 109]

                               YEAS--252

     Aderholt
     Archer
     Armey
     Bachus
     Baesler
     Baker
     Ballenger
     Barr
     Barrett (NE)
     Bartlett
     Barton
     Bass
     Bateman
     Bereuter
     Berry
     Bilbray
     Bilirakis
     Bliley
     Blunt
     Boehlert
     Boehner
     Bonilla
     Bono
     Boyd
     Brady
     Bryant
     Bunning
     Burr
     Burton
     Buyer
     Callahan
     Calvert
     Camp
     Campbell
     Canady
     Cannon
     Castle
     Chabot
     Chambliss
     Chenoweth
     Christensen
     Coble
     Coburn
     Collins
     Combest
     Cook
     Cooksey
     Cox
     Cramer
     Crane
     Crapo
     Cubin
     Cunningham
     Danner
     Davis (FL)
     Davis (VA)
     Deal
     DeLay
     Diaz-Balart
     Dickey
     Dingell
     Doolittle
     Doyle
     Dreier
     Duncan
     Dunn
     Ehlers
     Emerson
     English
     Ensign
     Everett
     Ewing
     Fawell
     Foley
     Forbes
     Fowler
     Fox
     Franks (NJ)
     Frelinghuysen
     Gallegly
     Ganske
     Gekas
     Gibbons
     Gilchrest
     Gillmor
     Gilman
     Goode
     Goodlatte
     Goodling
     Gordon
     Goss
     Graham
     Granger
     Green
     Gutknecht
     Hall (TX)
     Hansen
     Hastert
     Hastings (WA)
     Hayworth
     Hefley
     Herger
     Hill
     Hilleary
     Hobson
     Hoekstra
     Holden
     Horn
     Hostettler
     Houghton
     Hulshof
     Hunter
     Hutchinson
     Hyde
     Inglis
     Istook
     Jenkins
     John
     Johnson (CT)
     Johnson, Sam
     Jones
     Kanjorski
     Kasich
     Kelly
     Kim
     King (NY)
     Kingston
     Klink
     Klug
     Knollenberg
     Kolbe
     LaHood
     Largent
     Latham
     LaTourette
     Lazio
     Leach
     Lewis (CA)
     Lewis (KY)
     Livingston
     LoBiondo
     Lucas
     Manzullo
     Mascara
     McCarthy (MO)
     McCollum
     McCrery
     McDade
     McHugh
     McInnis
     McIntosh
     McKeon
     Metcalf
     Mica
     Miller (FL)
     Molinari
     Mollohan
     Moran (KS)
     Moran (VA)
     Morella
     Murtha
     Myrick
     Nethercutt
     Neumann
     Ney
     Northup
     Norwood
     Nussle
     Ortiz
     Oxley
     Packard
     Pappas
     Parker
     Paul
     Paxon
     Pease
     Peterson (MN)
     Peterson (PA)
     Petri
     Pickering
     Pickett
     Pitts
     Porter
     Portman
     Pryce (OH)
     Quinn
     Radanovich
     Ramstad
     Regula
     Riggs
     Riley
     Roemer
     Rogan
     Rogers
     Rohrabacher
     Ros-Lehtinen
     Royce
     Ryun
     Salmon
     Sandlin
     Sanford
     Saxton
     Scarborough
     Schaefer, Dan
     Schaffer, Bob
     Sensenbrenner
     Sessions
     Shadegg
     Shaw
     Shays
     Sherman
     Shimkus
     Shuster
     Sisisky
     Skeen
     Skelton
     Smith (MI)
     Smith (NJ)
     Smith (OR)
     Smith (TX)
     Smith, Adam
     Smith, Linda
     Snowbarger
     Solomon
     Souder
     Spence
     Stearns
     Stenholm
     Stump
     Sununu
     Tanner
     Taylor (NC)
     Thomas
     Thornberry
     Thune
     Tiahrt
     Traficant
     Turner
     Upton
     Walsh
     Wamp
     Watkins
     Watts (OK)
     Weldon (FL)
     Weldon (PA)
     Weller
     White
     Whitfield
     Wicker
     Wolf
     Young (AK)
     Young (FL)

                               NAYS--159

     Abercrombie
     Ackerman
     Allen
     Baldacci
     Barcia
     Barrett (WI)
     Bentsen
     Bishop
     Blagojevich
     Blumenauer
     Bonior
     Borski
     Boswell
     Brown (CA)
     Brown (FL)
     Brown (OH)
     Capps
     Cardin
     Carson
     Clayton
     Clement
     Clyburn
     Condit
     Conyers
     Costello
     Coyne
     Cummings
     Davis (IL)
     DeFazio
     DeGette
     Delahunt
     DeLauro
     Dellums
     Deutsch
     Dixon
     Doggett
     Edwards
     Engel
     Eshoo
     Etheridge
     Evans
     Farr
     Fattah
     Fazio
     Flake
     Foglietta
     Ford
     Frank (MA)
     Frost
     Furse
     Gejdenson
     Gonzalez
     Gutierrez
     Hall (OH)
     Hamilton
     Hastings (FL)
     Hefner
     Hilliard
     Hinchey
     Hinojosa
     Hooley
     Hoyer
     Jackson (IL)
     Jackson-Lee (TX)
     Jefferson
     Johnson (WI)
     Johnson, E. B.
     Kaptur
     Kennedy (MA)
     Kennedy (RI)
     Kennelly
     Kildee
     Kilpatrick
     Kind (WI)
     Kleczka
     Kucinich
     LaFalce
     Lampson
     Lantos
     Levin
     Lewis (GA)
     Lipinski
     Lofgren
     Lowey
     Luther
     Maloney (CT)
     Maloney (NY)
     Manton
     Markey
     Matsui
     McCarthy (NY)
     McDermott
     McGovern
     McHale
     McIntyre
     McNulty
     Meehan
     Meek
     Menendez
     Millender-McDonald
     Miller (CA)
     Minge
     Mink
     Moakley
     Nadler
     Neal
     Oberstar
     Obey
     Olver
     Owens
     Pallone
     Pascrell
     Pastor
     Payne
     Pomeroy
     Poshard
     Price (NC)
     Rahall
     Rangel
     Reyes
     Rivers
     Rodriguez
     Rothman
     Roukema
     Roybal-Allard
     Rush
     Sabo
     Sanchez
     Sanders
     Sawyer
     Schumer
     Scott
     Serrano
     Skaggs
     Slaughter
     Snyder
     Spratt
     Stabenow
     Stokes
     Strickland
     Stupak
     Tauscher
     Taylor (MS)
     Thompson
     Thurman
     Tierney
     Torres
     Towns
     Velazquez
     Vento
     Visclosky
     Waters
     Watt (NC)
     Waxman
     Wexler
     Weygand
     Wise
     Woolsey
     Wynn

                             NOT VOTING--22

     Andrews
     Becerra
     Berman
     Boucher
     Clay
     Dicks
     Dooley
     Ehrlich
     Filner
     Gephardt
     Greenwood
     Harman
     Linder
     Martinez
     McKinney
     Pelosi
     Pombo
     Schiff
     Stark
     Talent
     Tauzin
     Yates

                              {time}  2028

  Ms. DeGETTE and Messrs. FARR of California, OWENS, OBERSTAR, and 
BARCIA changed their vote from ``yea'' to ``nay.''
  Mrs. MORELLA and Mr. MASCARA changed their vote from ``nay'' to 
``yea.''
  So the resolution was agreed to.
  The result of the vote was announced as above recorded.
  A motion to reconsider was laid on the table.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Bonilla). Pursuant to House Resolution 
143 and rule XXIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of 
the Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the 
bill, H.R. 3.

                              {time}  2030


                     In the Committee of the Whole

  Accordingly, the House resolved itself into the Committee of the 
Whole House on the State of the Union for the consideration of the bill 
(H.R. 3) to combat violent youth crime and increase accountability for 
juvenile criminal offenses, with Mr. Kingston in the chair.
  The Clerk read the title of the bill.
  The CHAIRMAN. Pursuant to the rule, the bill is considered as having 
been read the first time.
  Under the rule, the gentleman from Florida [Mr. McCollum] and the 
gentlewoman from Texas [Ms. Jackson-Lee] will each control 30 minutes.
  The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Florida [Mr. McCollum].
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may 
consume.
  Mr. Chairman, let me begin by expressing my appreciation to the 
chairman of the full Committee on the Judiciary, the gentleman from 
Illinois [Mr. Hyde], my good friend, for his leadership and to the 
gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Conyers], the ranking member of the full 
committee, and the gentleman from New York [Mr. Schumer], the ranking 
member of the Crime Subcommittee, and their staffs for their 
cooperation in the development of this product that we have out here 
tonight, H.R. 3. The gentleman from New York [Mr. Schumer] in 
particular has worked very cooperatively on this bill. We disagree on 
some issues, but we

[[Page H2324]]

have worked in good faith and have reached as much consensus as 
possible.
  Mr. Chairman, today we begin consideration of one of the most 
important issues we will tackle in this Congress: The issue of juvenile 
crime. Every effort we undertake as lawmakers to improve the lives of 
our fellow citizens, whether it is about education, health care, 
housing, or flood control, the success of every effort depends upon the 
existence of an ordered society. If Americans are afraid to walk to the 
corner grocery store, or must worry about the safety of their children 
at school, economic growth, or improved education does little good.
  The clear truth is, Mr. Chairman, our constituents should be worried. 
America's juvenile justice system is broken. Violent juvenile crime is 
a national epidemic, and unless something is done quickly, it will soon 
get considerably worse.
  Listen to these statistics: Offenders under the age of 18 commit more 
than one out of every five violent crimes in America; that is one-fifth 
of all murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults. In 1995, they committed 
nearly 2 million crimes; 18-year-olds committed more murders than any 
other age group and 17-year-olds, more rapes. Juveniles 15 and younger 
were responsible for 64 percent of the violent offenses handled by the 
juvenile courts in 1994.
  Here is the really bad news: If these trends continue, juvenile 
arrests for violent crimes will more than double by the year 2010. The 
FBI predicts juveniles arrested for murder will increase 145 percent, 
forcible rape arrests will increase 66 percent, and aggravated assault 
arrests by 129 percent.
  Why? In the remaining years of this decade and throughout the next, 
America will experience a 31-percent increase in teenagers as the 
children of baby boomers come of age. In other words, we are going to 
have a surge in the population group that poses the biggest threat to 
public safety.
  Mr. Chairman, many academics and some in law enforcement fail to 
recognize the magnitude of this looming crisis. They cite the decline 
of the rate of violent crime in each of the last 4 years as proof that 
the fear of crime that permeates society is unfounded.
  Yes; the rate of violent crime per capita has gone down, but it is 
four times higher than it was in 1960. In that year, this country 
experienced 160 violent crimes per 100,000 people. In 1995, there were 
685 violent crimes for every 100,000 people. Last year's 10 percent 
decline hardly put a nick in this. There is a real danger of immediate 
and sharp reversal with the teen population boom ready to spring on us 
in the coming decade.
  We are here tonight because the juvenile justice system is unprepared 
for this coming storm. It is broken, and its failures have contributed 
to the magnitude of the present problem.
  Statistics paint a picture of a juvenile justice system in collapse. 
The percentage of violent juvenile offenders who are sentenced to 
confinement has actually decreased in the last 4 years. Only 10 percent 
of violent juvenile offenders receive any sort of institutional 
confinement, and that small percentage is back on the street in an 
average of 353 days. In other words, a juvenile who commits a cold-
blooded murder can be walking our neighborhood in less than a year.
  Of course, most juveniles receive no punishment at all. Nearly 40 
percent of violent juvenile offenders who come into contact with the 
juvenile justice system have their cases dismissed. It is not unusual 
for a youngster to come before a juvenile judge 10 or 12 times before 
any punishment is imposed. By the time the courts finally lock up an 
older teen for a violent crime, the offender has a long rap sheet 
starting in the early teens, or maybe younger. According to the Justice 
Department, 43 percent of juveniles in State institutions had more than 
5 prior arrests, and 20 percent had been arrested more than 10 times.
  Perhaps even worse, juveniles who vandalize stores or homes or write 
graffiti on buildings rarely come before a juvenile court. Police 
officers seldom see these kids and seldom refer them into custody, 
knowing there is little chance that they will receive punishment. Kids 
do not fear the consequences of their actions because they are rarely 
held accountable, and that is where the rub really lies in this whole 
situation.
  We are looking at a case, for example, of Daniel Doe in Ohio. What is 
wrong with the juvenile justice system?
  At age 12, Danny was arrested for vandalizing a neighbor's house. He 
had spray painted the walls, wrecked the furniture, and even went so 
far as to drown the pet bird in the bathtub. At 14 his criminal 
behavior had escalated to burglarizing an apartment. In the process he 
beat an elderly resident who died several days later from 
complications. For this crime he was convicted of involuntary 
manslaughter.
  Danny then entered the adult criminal justice system at the age of 19 
when he brutally beat a middle-aged woman in the act of burglarizing 
her home. He was sentenced for his crime, but by that time his juvenile 
arrest record had been erased. For the second time in the eyes of the 
law, Danny was treated as a first-time offender. The judge, ignorant of 
his violent past, gave him probation. Danny then went on to beat an 
elderly man to death in yet another burglary 2 months later.

  Who knows how many earlier minor crimes were not referred by police 
or adjudicated without punishment? Could Danny's life of violent crime 
have been prevented by an effective juvenile justice system? I would 
submit that perhaps it could have been.
  Crimes committed by juveniles are primarily handled by the States, 
but the collapse of the system has created a national crisis. Congress 
needs to provide incentives to the States to stimulate a core of 
critically and urgently needed repairs of the juvenile justice system, 
just as it did 2 years ago when faced with violent adult criminals who 
were serving about a third of their sentences. Congress then enacted a 
truth-in-sentencing grant program offering money for prison 
construction to States which change their laws to require violent 
offenders to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. More than 20 
States have now done so, and the average time served nationally is 
approaching 50 percent.
  A similar grant program is at the heart of H.R. 3, the Juvenile Crime 
Control Act of 1997, before us tonight. It is $1.5 billion over 3 years 
that would be provided in this bill to States and local communities to 
hire more juvenile judges, probation officers or prosecutors, construct 
juvenile detention facilities or whatever they decide they need to 
improve their juvenile justice system. To qualify for a grant, a State 
would have to assure the Justice Department that it has accomplished 
four core reforms.
  First, there must be a sanction such as community service for the 
very first act of juvenile delinquency and graduated sections for each 
delinquent act thereafter. Police and prosecutors must take young 
vandals before juvenile courts, and judges must impose punishment. If 
kids see the consequences to their early delinquent acts, far fewer 
will evolve into violent criminals.
  Next, the State must ensure that prosecutors have the discretion to 
prosecute as adults juveniles 15 and older who commit serious violent 
crimes. Such teenagers need to be locked up for a long time, the same 
as violent criminals 18 and older.
  Third, States must establish a recordkeeping system for juveniles 
adjudicated delinquents. This system would ensure that the records of 
any young offender adjudicated a delinquent two or more times are 
treated for the purposes of maintenance and availability the same as 
adult criminal records if the second offense or a later one is a 
felony. Today's common practice of keeping juvenile records sealed and 
erasing them when a juvenile reaches 18 must be stopped for those who 
are repeat violent offenders.
  Last, State law must not prevent a judge from holding parents 
accountable, not for the delinquent act of the child, but for 
fulfilling a responsibility directed by the court at the time a 
sanction is imposed on a juvenile for a delinquent act. Juvenile judges 
must be given the authority to fine or otherwise sanction parents for 
not following court orders designed to force a parent to act 
responsibly in overseeing a child's behavior.
  Without these core reforms and without an infusion of dramatically 
greater resources by the States to match the Federal funds, juvenile 
justice systems

[[Page H2325]]

of our Nation cannot be revived. There are many things that need to be 
done to fight juvenile crime, but none are more critical than repairing 
our juvenile justice system.
  The second thing this bill does is to establish a model Federal 
system for holding juveniles accountable for their crimes. These model 
procedures are designed to give prosecutors the control they need to 
protect the public, to give judges the authority they need to impose 
meaningful sanctions against all juvenile offenders, and to hold 
parents of juveniles responsible for supervising their children and to 
give law enforcement officials the records they need to know the 
criminal history of young criminals much like we are asking the States 
to do if they qualify to receive the block grant money under this 
proposal.
  Under these procedures, no juveniles will be in prison with adults. 
Under current law, which is unchanged by this bill, all juvenile 
prisoners must be separated from adults. To those who say otherwise, I 
say read the bill. The committee rejected two provisions from the 
President's bill which would have loosened this standard.
  Third, H.R. 3 enhances the Federal Government's tools for targeting, 
in limited situations, the most dangerous juvenile criminals. This bill 
is not a takeover of juvenile justice. It does not expand Federal 
authority. But when Federal enforcement is needed such as when State 
and local law enforcement officials are overwhelmed by violent street 
gangs, this bill will make Federal law enforcement more effective in 
protecting the public.
  Finally, Mr. Chairman, let me briefly touch on the issue of 
prevention. We will hear a lot from the other side about prevention and 
the perceived inadequacies of this bill in the area of preventing 
crime. Well, I have three brief responses to this concern.
  First, when there are real consequences for juvenile crimes, and when 
there are these real consequences, particularly crimes committed by 
younger offenders, we can stop criminal careers before they have a 
chance to get started. In other words, holding juveniles accountable is 
prevention.
  Second, we must all remember that this bill is only a part of a 
larger legislative effort to deal with juvenile crime. The prevention 
funding in the administration's juvenile crime bill is in the 
jurisdiction of the Committee on Education and the Workforce. That 
committee will be bringing forth a juvenile crime prevention bill 
within the next several weeks. That bill will be a small but 
significant part of the billions of dollars that will be spent by the 
Federal Government this year to prevent crime.
  Third, I still support the funding for block grants passed in the 
Contract With America that are now being used by local governments for 
crime prevention and supportive law enforcement. I will be working with 
appropriators to find the funds necessary to support both the juvenile 
justice grants in this bill and the more general purpose public safety 
block grants that were passed in the last Congress as a part of the 
appropriations process.
  So Mr. Chairman, I look forward to the debate on this bill. I urge my 
colleagues to support H.R. 3 and begin the process of repairing 
America's collapsed juvenile justice system.
  Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 3 minutes.
  Mr. Chairman, when we started this process, I recognize that the 
gentleman from Florida sought out a great deal of data. As I have 
indicated earlier in my discussions on the floor regarding juvenile 
crime, it would really be nice if this was a bipartisan effort. But 
obviously, H.R. 3 is not a bill that addresses the question of juvenile 
crime prevention and real solutions.
  Today, in a hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, we heard 
from the Concerned Alliance of Men. It so happens that they say they 
cure crime, violent crime among youngsters, with a hug. Many of us 
would look at this in a very skeptical manner, but if my colleagues 
heard those gentlemen today, they would realize that we can prevent 
juvenile crime. We can prevent it with targeted efforts toward 
recognizing that prevention is important.
  I asked the chairman why prevention and prevention efforts cannot be 
in this juvenile crime bill proposed by the Committee on the Judiciary. 
We have done it before. We did it in the 1994 crime bill. It worked.
  This legislation will not make us safer but only divert attention 
from real and more difficult solutions. We need a balanced approach 
that encompasses both punishment and prevention. The juvenile justice 
systems were first established in the United States at the turn of the 
century, to emphasize rehabilitation for youthful offenders.
  Today's youth may or may not be more troubled than in the past, but a 
system that treats juveniles differently than adults seeking through a 
combination of measured punishment treatment and counseling, to divert 
them from destructive paths and keep them within the fold of 
responsible law-abiding citizens still is an important and real 
approach in which we should go.

                              {time}  2030

  To be sure, violent and dangerous youth must be prevented from 
inflicting additional suffering. But the chairman recognizes that as 
the Judiciary Committee traveled across the country, it is well known 
that the bulk of juvenile crime falls within a small number of States.
  We have good kids in America. Those that need help need it by way of 
counseling, prevention, and other means other than locking up juveniles 
with adults. We do not need to hear about six adult prisoners who 
murdered a 17-year-old boy while he was incarcerated in a juvenile cell 
block in an adult jail in Ohio. Do we need to hear about, in Idaho, a 
17-year-old boy held in an adult jail who was tortured and then 
murdered by other prisoners; or in Ohio, a 15-year-old who was raped 
while she was incarcerated? Why do we not have an amendment that 
separates adults from juveniles?
  Recognizing that the Rand Corp. is not the most liberal think tank in 
this country, it has recently issued a report demonstrating that crime 
prevention efforts aimed at disadvantaged kids are more effective than 
tough prison terms in keeping our citizenry safe.
  Then, what about the trigger lock? What an interesting approach H.R. 
3 takes by refusing to stand up to the National Rifle Association, when 
80 percent of Americans say a trigger lock is a valid approach to 
preventing juvenile crime. It does not seem to make sense. It does not 
seem that we are on a balanced approach.
  The 1994 crime bill authorized funding for numerous juvenile 
prevention programs, as I said earlier. Since Republicans gained the 
majority, we have spent not a single cent for prevention. It seems we 
have missed the boat. We have missed the trigger. We have missed our 
direction. We are misguided. Rather than with a hug, recognizing that 
we can save more children with prevention, we now have on the floor of 
the House H.R. 3, in total disregard of all of the current knowledge 
that we have, and the body of law and the body of knowledge that says 
we can save our children with a better approach, more prevention.
  Mr. Chairman, I rise to voice my concerns regarding H.R. 3, the 
Juvenile Crime Control Act of 1997. As a member of both the Judiciary 
Committee and the Democratic Caucus's Juvenile Justice Task Force, I 
have spent a great deal of time over the last months analyzing, 
discussing and debating this bill and I find the bill very troubling.
  I want to say first that I agree that the enormous rise in the rate 
of juvenile crime is a serious problem that we, in this Congress, must 
address. I recognize that those persons who commit the most heinous 
crimes, be they juveniles or adults, must be punished. I am concerned, 
however, to see this bill focus on harsher penalties for juvenile 
offenders rather than addressing the reasons that so many children turn 
to crime in the first place. It seems to me that the failure to address 
these underlying reasons is terribly short-sighted. If we really hope 
to solve this problem and to reduce violence, we must address both 
parts of the equation--prevention and punishment.
  Most public policy analysts confirm that early prevention programs 
offer the best hope to stem juvenile crime. They emphasize the 
importance of better schools and more job training, recreation and 
mentoring programs. Such initiatives provide children with positive 
role models and increase economic opportunities.

[[Page H2326]]

  H.R. 3 allows children as young as 13 years old to be tried in adult 
court. Evidence, however, suggests that children tried as adults have a 
higher recidivism rate than comparable children tried as juveniles. 
Children tried as adults reoffend sooner, commit more serious offenses, 
and reoffend more often. For example, in Florida which pioneered 
mandatory waiver of juveniles into adult courts in the early 1980's, a 
recent study compared the recidivism rate of juveniles transferred to 
the adult criminal courts with those kept in the juvenile system. The 
study concluded that youths tried as adults commit even more crimes 
after release than do those allowed to remain in the juvenile system. 
Another study, comparing New York and New Jersey juvenile offenders, 
shows that the rearrest rate for children sentenced in juvenile court 
was 29 percent lower than the rearrest rate for juveniles sentenced in 
the adult court system.
  There are a number of other provisions in H.R. 3 that I find 
disturbing such as that allowing juveniles to be housed predisposition 
in prison with adults and that making juvenile  records available to 
the public.

  Housing of juveniles in adult prisons places them in very real and 
very serious danger. A 1989 study by Jeffrey Fagan titled ``Youth in 
Prisons and Training Schools: Perceptions and Consequences of the 
Treatment-Custody Dichotomy'' shows that children in adult institutions 
are five times more likely to be attacked with a weapon than juveniles 
confined in a juvenile facility. This fact is evidenced by a number of 
cases. On April 25, 1996, six adult prisoners murdered a 17-year-old 
boy while he was incarcerated in the juvenile cellblock of an adult 
jail in Ohio. In Idaho, a 17-year-old boy held in an adult jail was 
tortured and finally murdered by other prisoners in the cell. In Ohio, 
a juvenile court judge put a 15-year-old girl in adult county jail to 
teach her a lesson. On the fourth night of her confinement, she was 
sexually assaulted by a deputy jailer.
  There are already enough tragic stories to document the ill-advised 
policy of housing juveniles with adults and in adult prisons. Do we 
really want to place more children in such a position of danger?
  With respect to the release of juvenile records to the public, I am 
again troubled. The juvenile justice system was founded on the 
principle that juvenile offenders are children and as such should not 
be held to the same standard of culpability as adult offenders. The 
juvenile justice system has been based on the premise of 
rehabilitation; to provide the juvenile access to programs and life 
skills that he or she has not gained in the community. When the 
juvenile reenters the community he or she is to begin fresh without the 
public stigma of a criminal record.
  I agree that to protect the public from certain of these juvenile 
offenders law enforcement officials and some social service 
organizations must have access to juvenile records. I am convinced, 
however, that publicly disclosing the court records of a juvenile will 
permanently stigmatize the child at an early age which will follow the 
child into adulthood; thus, inhibiting efforts to rehabilitate the 
child as well as the child's future employment and educational 
opportunities.
  H.R. 3 is a flawed, one-sided piece of legislation. It focuses our 
energy and attention exclusively on only one-part of what is a complex 
problem. We must pursue a more balanced approach. If we are truly 
serious about stemming the tide of juvenile crime--and I do not doubt 
the sincerity of everyone in this body on that question--we must 
provide both punishment and prevention. The answer to the juvenile 
crime problem will not be found in the building of more prisons or the 
imposition of harsher sentences. We will only be successful in our 
battle against this crisis when we stop the creation of these young 
criminals.
  Mr. Chairman, I share the concern about the problem of juvenile crime 
that led to H.R. 3. I do not, however, share H.R. 3's vision of a 
solution to this problem and I urge my colleagues to vote against H.R. 
3.
  Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina 
[Mr. Watt], a very active and strong proponent of the issues we are 
discussing in this bill.
  Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, for the first time in this 
House I am going to speak from the Republican side, because I want to 
remind my Republican friends of a few things.
  Mr. Chairman, let me put this bill in historical perspective. Go back 
through the whole history of America. At the Federal level, we have 
never, ever had a Federal juvenile judge. Never have we had a Federal 
juvenile probation officer. Never have we had a Federal juvenile 
facility.
  The reason for that is that all throughout our history, juvenile 
justice has been a matter of State and local law. Yet, my conservative 
Republican colleagues all of a sudden have decided that we are going to 
federalize juvenile justice in this country. We do not even do a good 
job of criminal justice for adults, yet we are going to federalize and 
tell the States what they are going to do in the arena of juvenile 
justice.
  Mr. Chairman, something is wrong with that. Something is also wrong 
with the fact that only 11 States, at most, will be eligible for any 
kind of grant under this bill. My State, where one-fifth of the 
juveniles have been tried and convicted and incarcerated as adults, in 
the whole United States the State of North Carolina still will not be 
eligible for funds under this bill. Why? Because we do not have open 
juvenile records; because our judges decide who gets prosecuted as an 
adult if they are a juvenile, not our prosecutors deciding it. We do 
not have a law that holds parents, sanctions parents if they do not 
closely supervise their children.
  Three out of the four requirements to get funds under this bill we do 
not meet in North Carolina. We have the most aggressive juvenile 
justice system in America in North Carolina. Guess what States qualify 
for funds under the bill? The principal sponsor, his State qualifies. I 
would encourage all of us to look at what States qualify and defeat 
this bill.
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may 
consume.
  Mr. Chairman, I would like to acknowledge there are provisions that 
require a State to qualify. I would doubt very many States technically 
qualify right now, because the purpose of the grant program the 
gentleman from North Carolina is talking about, the heart of this bill, 
is an incentive grant program to get the States to repair their broken 
criminal justice system.
  The idea here is that we are attempting to get the States to move in 
the direction of doing things that are not very hard for them to do. I 
think 25 States, and I do not know that my State of Florida qualifies, 
the gentleman says the Justice Department says so, but I do not see 
that they do, because I do not see the courts sanctioning those early 
juvenile delinquent acts. I do not see them taking the first juvenile 
delinquent act in every case and giving some sort of punishment to it. 
I do not see the police referring the cases there. I do not think that 
happens in any State. But it is not hard to get there. The laws do not 
have to be changed, the States just have to start doing it.
  In the case of the prosecutions with regard to adult offenses, very 
easy; all they have to do is give the flexibility to the prosecutors. 
They do not have to prosecute 15-year-olds and older that commit 
violent felonies as adults.
  The recordkeeping requirements are easy to enact, and the question of 
allowing judges, I think most States probably do, but maybe a few do 
not, juvenile judges to hold parents accountable for things the judge 
charges them to do, very easy to qualify. But technically I suspect 
every State is not qualifying right now, but they are given a year to 
do that. That is the reason, the raison d'etre, for the existence of 
this bill; to repair, to encourage the States with a carrot, not a 
stick, to repair the broken juvenile justice system of this Nation.
  I will yield to anybody saying that this is a primarily State 
function, not a Federal function, but we have a national crisis, and we 
need to do that.
  Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. McCOLLUM. I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina.
  Mr. WATT of North Carolina. I thank the gentleman for yielding, Mr. 
Chairman.
  Is it not ironic that the gentleman's State qualifies, and no other 
State in America qualifies?
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Chairman, if I can reclaim my time, the gentleman 
said it did. I do not know that any qualify. I do not believe Florida 
qualifies.
  Mr. WATT of North Carolina. What good is the bill if no one 
qualifies?
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Florida does not qualify, in my opinion.
  Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. McCOLLUM. I yield to the gentleman from Oklahoma for the purposes 
of a colloquy.
  Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

[[Page H2327]]

  The purpose of this colloquy is to discuss the grant program under 
the provisions of H.R. 3, and to ask the chairman as to his 
consideration for the youth challenge programs as presently run by the 
National Guard. There are 15 of them, and they have done a wonderful 
job in terms of improving the opportunities for young people.
  There have been now over 30,000 young people go through that program. 
There is only one now incarcerated in the entire United States that has 
worked through that program. It is one of the Government programs that 
is effective, that works, that restores self-respect, restores dignity, 
and restores responsibility in young people that are at risk.
  My question, Mr. Chairman, is will these youth challenge programs in 
the State of Oklahoma and other States qualify under this bill for the 
grant, the block grant moneys?
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Chairman, I would say to the gentleman, yes, they 
would qualify. The local communities make that decision.
  On page 24 of the bill, item number 11, it says one of those things 
for which they would qualify is programs establishing and maintaining 
accountability that work with juvenile offenders who are referred by 
law enforcement agencies or which are designed in cooperation with law 
enforcement officials to protect students and school personnel from 
drug, gang, and youth violence. So it would qualify under these 
provisions, in answer to the gentleman's questions.
  Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman.
  Mr. WATT of North Carolina. If the gentleman will yield further, Mr. 
Chairman, the gentleman's State is going to have to do all these crazy 
mandatory things before this challenge thing is going to give him a 
dime worth of money.
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, there are no crazy 
mandatory things in this bill. There are four core things that I have 
reiterated several times over tonight that the State must do to qualify 
for an incentive grant. We have lots of Federal grant programs out here 
in many areas on the books today which have far more restrictive 
elements in it than this does.
  Democrats, on their side of the aisle, for years they have had all 
kinds of restrictions on how to spend money, how they spend money on 
various programs when they get it. We do not restrict that to any 
degree here. What we restrict is the qualifiers that have always been 
imposed in enormous numbers by the other side of the aisle.
  Now tonight they are out here complaining about the three or four 
little things we want to have done to repair the juvenile justice 
system to qualify for Federal grant programs to repair that system.
  Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the 
gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Scott], a former member of the 
Subcommittee on Crime, and a strong and knowledgable person on these 
very vital issues.
  Mr. SCOTT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman from Texas for 
yielding time to me.
  Mr. Chairman, we know how to reduce crime. We know what works. We 
know what does not work. Studies have shown that Head Start, Job Corps, 
drug rehabilitation, truancy prevention, those kinds of programs that 
give young people constructive things to do with their time and adult 
interaction, those that increase their education and job opportunities, 
those are the kinds of things that work. Job Corps, Head Start, and 
others have been shown to save more money than they cost by reducing 
crime and reducing future welfare expenses.
  Mr. Chairman, we know what sounds tough and does not work. We know 
that the sound bite--if you do the adult crime, you do the adult time--
we know that if you treat more juveniles as adults, all of the studies 
show that the crime rate, the violent crime rate will go up if we 
codify that sound bite.
  We know mandatory minimums have no deterrent effect on juveniles, 
because they do not make those kinds of calculations. They act 
impulsively. So we know what works, we know what does not work. We also 
know that when we say we are not tough, we have to recognize that we 
are already jailing more people in America than anywhere else on Earth. 
We have some communities that have more young people locked up in jails 
than they have in college.
  We know that more money in prisons cannot possibly have, since we 
lock so many people up already, cannot possibly have an effect on the 
crime rate. So it makes no sense, waiting for the children to mess up 
and then lock them up, when it is cheaper to invest in crime prevention 
programs and prevent them from getting in trouble in the first place.
  For example, the Rand study shows that parental training, the money 
put into that program, is three times more cost effective than the 
three-strikes-and-you-are-out, good, tough-sounding sound bite.
  So we have today's bill, with the major provisions--treat more 13-
year-olds as adults, and more young people treated as adults--proven to 
increase violence; more exposure to mandatory minimums constantly, with 
no effect or deterrence; more money for prisons that cannot possibly do 
any good, since most States are already spending more in prisons than 
they are in higher education. Those are the kinds of things that do not 
make any difference at all.
  So we have a choice. We can pass this good-sounding but ineffective 
bill, or we can defeat the bill and focus our attention on proven, 
cost-effective initiatives which will actually reduce the crime rate 
and make our streets safer.
  I would hope we would defeat the bill, Mr. Chairman, and focus our 
attention where it can do some good.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 20 seconds.
  Mr. Chairman, the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Scott] has just made a 
valid point. Let me simply share for the Record, the average cost of 
incarcerating a juvenile for 1 year is between $35,000 and $64,000 a 
year. In contrast, Head Start costs $4,300 per child.
  Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from California 
[Ms. Lofgren], who has been an active participant on this and the 
Juvenile Task Force.
  Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Chairman, we think about juvenile delinquency, and 
we know it is a serious problem in our country. I think it is very easy 
for us to lose our way, however, because we do not, as a country, often 
make the distinction between what we need to do for justice compared to 
what we need to do for public safety. The two are not always the same.
  For those who have been victimized by crime, there is never a fair 
answer. But we do know that victims of crime seek justice. They seek to 
be made whole. They seek punishment for those who did harm to them or 
to a loved one.

                              {time}  2100

  That is a human emotion that we all feel and share, and our hearts go 
out to victims of crime. However, punishment does not always mean that 
we will have a system that keeps us safe. Our job as legislators is to 
acknowledge and to provide for victim's need to have justice in the 
system, but in a more generic way to take thoughtful, accountable, 
cost-effective steps to prevent more victims from being created, and to 
make sure that we have a safe society.
  The problem with H.R. 3 is that it takes $1.5 billion and puts it 
into systems that have not worked instead of putting it into systems 
that will keep us safer. We know when we look at the Federal aspects of 
the bill that it is very extreme. Automatic trial of 14-year-olds 
without judicial review who are alleged to have committed certain 
offenses will not make us safer.
  When we look at the system put in place for the States, we have 
already heard the comments that most States will not be eligible for 
funds. We also have received a communication today from the National 
Conference of State Legislatures pleading with us to oppose the 
mandates that are embodied in H.R. 3.
  We know that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We 
should listen to the Nation's police chiefs. Nine out of ten of the 
police chiefs of America, in a recent survey, say that America could 
sharply reduce crime if government invested in some early prevention 
programs. Police chiefs picked investments in kids by a 3 to 1 margin 
over other alternatives, including treating and trying juveniles as 
adults.

[[Page H2328]]

  So, yes, let us hold young kids accountable when they need to be. 
There are some teenagers who need to be tried as adults, who need to be 
held to adult standards. Our system provides for that, and it should. 
But if we do only that, if we neglect the thousands and millions of 
young people who are starting to go off track right now, we will never 
get ahead of this problem and we will do a disservice to public safety.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the 
gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Stupak], an ex-police officer who knows 
about prevention.
  Mr. STUPAK. Mr. Chairman, we have a substitute that will be offered 
tomorrow which is a tough bill, it is smart and it is balanced.
  The bill put forth by the majority party tonight is not smart and it 
is not balanced and its toughness only comes from trying to lock up 
young people. We have a carrot, says the majority. That carrot is based 
upon 197 juveniles that we have in the Federal system. Of those 197, 
120 are Native Americans.
  So we have 77 juveniles and we are using these 77 juveniles to be the 
carrot for the 300,000 juveniles that are around the States. So we tell 
them we have these certain incentives, these certain carrots, and 
therefore if they do what we tell them to do, we will make available 
$1.5 billion to punish young people.
  The National Conference of State Legislatures wrote to all of us 
today and said the bill is an unfunded mandate. The Federal Government 
is now going to apply, and I will quote, ``new rules nationwide 
regarding juvenile records, judicial discretion, parental and juvenile 
responsibilities; these present new obstacles for the States that need 
Federal funds.'' And, therefore, they oppose the bill. The State 
legislatures, the council oppose the bill.
  What have you done? You give zero money for early intervention, zero 
money for detention, zero money for prevention, and instead you want to 
try 15-year-old kids as adults with the option of trying 13-year-old 
kids as adults and you say that they got to do what Congress says; if 
not, they get no money. Only 12 States will get money; well, maybe 11. 
My State of Michigan will receive no money.
  You say you do not know what is in there. Your own report from the 
conference, your own report from your committee, the majority and 
minority report lists the 12 States. Thirty-eight States plus the 
District of Columbia cannot partake in this bill. And this is a 
balanced approach to law enforcement?
  You say you are going to get tough because if you get tough, you will 
stop crime before it starts. Well, I was a cop. I was there. The old 
ways do not work. If we continue down your way of locking up every kid 
who steps out of line, we cannot arrest our way out of this problem. We 
are going to lose a whole other generation of young people. We will 
lose a whole other generation of young people as we are trying to be 
tough, and we have this carrot based on 197 juveniles who are in the 
Federal system, 197 juveniles.
  If we take a look at the bill, your bill does not address what the 
communities need. Communities have come to us and said, give us 
flexibility. Let us work with our own communities. The problems in 
northern Michigan are much different than the problems in Florida or 
L.A. or Boston. They need flexibility. They do not need more Federal 
mandates.
  Mr. Chairman, I will submit the letter the National Conference of 
State Legislatures addressed to Members of Congress in opposition to 
H.R. 3.
  Mr. Chairman, I include for the Record the letter from which I 
quoted:

                                            National Conference of


                                           State Legislatures,

                                      Washington, DC, May 7, 1997.
       Dear Member of Congress: We are writing to express our 
     opposition to mandates in H.R. 3, the Juvenile Crime Control 
     Act of 1997. Mandates in existing law require that states 
     deinstitutionalize status offenders, remove juveniles from 
     jails and lock-ups, and separate juvenile delinquents from 
     adult offenders. Under H.R. 3, the federal government would 
     apply new rules nationwide relating to juvenile records, 
     judicial discretion and parental and juvenile responsibility. 
     These present new obstacles for states that need federal 
     funds.
       States are enacting many laws that attack the problem of 
     violent juvenile crime comprehensively. Many have lowered the 
     age at which juveniles may be charged as adults for violent 
     crimes; others have considered expanding prosecutors' 
     discretion. Without clear proof that one choice is more 
     effective than the other, Congress would deny funding for 
     juvenile justice to states where just one element in the 
     state's comprehensive approach to juvenile justice differs 
     from the federal mandate.
       The change of directions ought to make Congress wary of 
     inflexible mandates. For example, until federal law was 
     changed in 1994 states were forbidden to detain juveniles for 
     possession of a gun--because possession was a ``status'' 
     offense. The federal response was not merely to allow states 
     to detain children for possession, but to create a new 
     federal offense of juvenile possession of a handgun. (Pub. L. 
     103-322, Sec. 11201). The advantage of states as laboratories 
     is that their choices put the nation less at risk. This bill 
     would make the nation the laboratory.
       NCSL submits that the proposed mandates, however well-
     intentioned, are short-sighted and counter-productive. We 
     urge you to strike the mandates from H.R. 3.
           Sincerely,
                                                 William T. Pound,
                                               Executive Director.

  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute.
  Mr. Chairman, in response to what the gentleman has just said, I am 
sure there are some legislatures and maybe the whole council, as he has 
said, who do not want to see this passed because they do not like 
anything that we put out there in the way of a carrot, if you will, or 
an incentive in a grant program. They did not even like the prison 
grant program we put out a couple years ago. I do not know if there are 
many Federal programs that go out there without anything attached to 
them saying they have to do something to qualify to get the money.
  The truth of the matter is, we held 6 regional crime forums in the 
last two years, the Subcommittee on Crime, around the country where we 
invited every State's attorney general to help us get together juvenile 
judges and probation officers and people who worked in the juvenile 
justice system to hear what the problems were, to understand what was 
really wrong out there. And they all said to us, there is a crisis, 
there is a problem. It is beyond the scope of what we can do here at 
home. We are not getting the legislatures of the States to respond to 
us. We do not have anybody lobbying for us. Please help us.
  Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes and 15 seconds to the gentleman from 
Arkansas [Mr. Hutchinson], a member of the subcommittee.
  Mr. HUTCHINSON. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of H.R. 3, the 
Juvenile Crime Control Act of 1997. As a former Federal prosecutor and, 
more importantly, as a parent of a teenager, I want to express my 
thanks to the gentleman from Florida, the chairman of the Subcommittee 
on Crime, for his important work on this issue.
  I have to be honest, Mr. Chairman, that I had some reservations about 
this bill in the beginning, but I read the bill, I studied the bill. 
And after hearing the testimony in committee and the concerns of law 
enforcement and the statements of professionals who deal with the 
juvenile issues, I am convinced that this bill will improve, first of 
all, our Federal system of handling juveniles and, secondly, it will 
encourage the States to enforce accountability in their dealings with 
juvenile crimes.
  Before I get into the substance of the bill I want to take a moment 
and congratulate our States and localities and our cities on the work 
that they are doing on this important issue. A number of State 
legislatures have recognized a growing threat of juvenile crime and 
have taken swift action to crack down on the serious offenders.
  However, there is still work to do and there are many jurisdictions 
that have not taken that action. This bill sets out a model program for 
States to follow, and this is important, if they so choose. Contrary to 
what some reports have indicated and what some have said, nothing in 
this bill imposes mandates on the States. Participation in the block 
grant program is entirely voluntary and changes in the law only apply 
to the Federal courts. It is not an unfunded mandate by any means.
  The bill itself provides a great deal of flexibility to the States as 
they set about to reform juvenile crime procedures. The block grant 
provisions provide significant resources to the States and localities 
to fight juvenile crime.

[[Page H2329]]

  Just this day I received a request from the prosecuting attorney of 
Washington County, Fayetteville, AR who is a Democrat-elected 
prosecuting attorney. He says that juvenile crimes are on the upswing 
in this country and funds are badly need to assist our juvenile deputy 
prosecutors and to fund programs that attempt to stop juvenile crime 
before it occurs, and he asks support for this bill.
  So it is important for the States that they have this flexibility, 
that they have the opportunity for these funds.
  The block grant is to be used for a wide variety of purposes, leaving 
discretion at the local level who are on the front lines. What works in 
New York City may not work in northwest Arkansas. Law enforcement 
officials in each locality must have the discretion and the latitude to 
design their own crime-fighting plan, and this bill allows that 
flexibility to exist.
  I did have a couple of concerns on the bill that were addressed very 
clearly in the committee, and the chairman was very cooperative in 
addressing my concerns. One was on the issue of juvenile records. Under 
the original bill, juveniles who were adjudicated as delinquents would 
have their records made public in the same manner as adults. This was 
amended during the committee process, very importantly, so that now a 
first-time offender, a one-time offender will maintain those records as 
confidential as a juvenile delinquent.
  But repeat offenders are a different story. The second time around as 
a juvenile delinquent, their records will become available for public 
scrutiny, and I do believe this is an important change. In Arkansas we 
will have to change the law to a certain extent, but I believe it is a 
positive change.
  The second concern centered on the criteria the States must meet for 
the block grant programs. One of the benchmarks of the block grants 
would be that the States would have to assure that juveniles age 15 and 
older are treated as adults if they commit, not any crime, but a 
serious violent crime, and also that the prosecutor has the authority 
to determine whether or not to prosecute such juveniles as adults.
  Again, my reading of the bill, and I have talked to the chairman of 
the Subcommittee on Crime about this, is that in Arkansas there would 
be no need for change in legislation because the prosecutor has the 
discretion whether to file charges as an adult or as a juvenile. The 
court does have an opportunity to review that decision if a proper 
motion is made, but the prosecutor has the initial discretion whether 
or not to file charges in a serious violent crime case.
  So I think those changes made the bill better. I think it is a very 
good bill. It gives flexibility to the States and it allows the States 
to adopt programs with funds available for them that will really meet 
the needs of juvenile crime, as was indicated by the Democrat 
prosecutor from Washington County who asked me to support this today.
  Mr. Chairman, I believe that this is a good bill. In closing, let me 
emphasize that the prosecution of juveniles as adults under this bill 
is reserved for only the most heinous offenders, commission of serious 
violent crimes and serious drug offenses. They must carry appropriate 
punishment. This legislation goes a long way toward fixing a system 
that fails to hold juveniles accountable for their actions. I am very 
pleased to support it.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 15 seconds to 
say that it is clear 38 States will not be able to participate under 
this legislation. Thirty-eight States with millions of children will be 
deprived of having the opportunity to prevent juvenile crime and 
rehabilitate our children.
  Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island 
[Mr. Kennedy], who has had a constant interest in the area of juvenile 
law and juvenile crime.
  Mr. KENNEDY of Rhode Island. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman 
from Texas for yielding me the time. I would like to also add from the 
outset that my State is among those 38 States that cannot even begin to 
access any of the funds under this bill. I might add it just shows how 
this bill is not a serious bill, because if it was serious in trying to 
change the effect of juvenile crime, it would certainly address the 
fact that it ignores 38 States of these United States from having 
access to the funds in this bill to do the kinds of things that our 
States feel make a difference in reducing crime.

                              {time}  2115

  I just want to make one statement, a simple statement about this 
bill, and that is it does nothing, nothing to solve the problems that 
we are facing in juvenile crime and, in fact, it makes the problems 
worse.
  The facts show that we have a problem here. The facts show that kids 
sentenced to adult facilities have a higher recidivism rate than those 
sentenced to juvenile detention centers. Guess what this bill wants to 
do? It wants to send more of them to adult facilities. In essence, this 
bill is ignoring the facts.
  Second, the facts are that these kids will face shorter sentences. 
Because as I said earlier, judges, when faced with a teenager versus a 
hardened criminal, guess what the judge is going to do? They will not 
give them nearly the sentence they would otherwise get in the juvenile 
court. Guess what this bill does? Ignores the facts and sends the kids 
to adult jails where they will not be given the harsh sentences where 
those kids might need it.
  Third fact. These kids, if they are sent to the adult facilities, and 
as I said the sentences are shorter, they will come out meaner than we 
ever could have imagined them ever ending up if we had sent them to a 
juvenile center. And anybody listening to this program tonight on C-
SPAN will understand me when I tell them that sending teenagers to 
adult correctional systems as the means to reduce recidivism, when we 
know the recidivism rates are higher amongst kids that go to the adult 
correction systems, give me a break.
  I want to add one more thing. It is scandalous. I say it is 
scandalous that we have minorities, African-Americans, that constitute 
15 percent of our population, and guess what? They constitute 72 
percent, I say to the gentleman from Florida, 72 percent in our 
juvenile system. What does the gentleman's bill do about that?
  We passed a law in this Congress in the early seventies that dealt 
with it. It was called the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency 
Prevention. And one of the mandates of that legislation was to say this 
country ought to address the problem that 15 percent of our population 
is being incarcerated at the rate of 72 percent. It is scandalous. It 
is scandalous. And the gentleman's bill does nothing, I repeat, 
nothing, but exacerbate that problem.
  This Congress, with statistics like that, should turn the other way 
and think again before we adopt a bill that, as I said, ignores these 
fundamental facts.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the 
gentlewoman from New York [Mrs. McCARTHY], who has firsthand knowledge 
on some of these very vital issues.
  Mrs. McCARTHY of New York. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to H.R. 
3. This juvenile justice debate is personal and emotional to me because 
it is a debate about saving lives.
  As I visit schools in my district in New York and talk to the kids in 
grade school, middle school and high school, I hear firsthand that they 
are sick of living in fear of violence.
  In order to reduce violence and save lives we have to effectively 
attack juvenile criminals. H.R. 3 does not effectively address basic 
juvenile crime issues. Rather, the bill before us tonight is a 
collection of overly prescriptive, top-down, Washington-knows-best 
mandates.
  Furthermore, the legislation completely fails to address the gun 
issues, and we cannot seriously discuss juvenile crime without the gun 
epidemic facing this country.
  In order to save lives we have to allow our States and local 
governments to utilize programs that they know work best. This bill 
will not even let New York take advantage of the money that we need. 
This legislation ties the hands of local judges and prosecutors. If our 
State and local governments want to access badly needed Federal funds, 
they must submit to certain requirements in this bill.
  Unfortunately, statistics show that the prescriptions that we are 
forcing down our local governments' throats may not be the best option 
for local

[[Page H2330]]

crime problems. In fact, recent success in local communities such as 
Boston may not even qualify for Federal funding under this bill.
  Under this bill, Congress is saying, We will take your tax dollars 
but you cannot take them back. It does not matter if you have already 
committed to saving kids' lives by getting tough on juvenile crime, you 
have to do what we say or else you will not get your hard-earned tax 
money back. That is wrong.
  There is another important personal issue for me that has been 
completely left out of this bill. We have taken a pass on the high 
priority issue of reducing gun violence. The sponsor of this bill 
states that we can wait for a while and deal with this issue later. I 
rise to say that we cannot wait. Juvenile justice is about saving 
lives, and I support certainly not this bill.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I will inquire again on the 
time, please.
  The CHAIRMAN. The gentlewoman from Texas [Ms. Jackson-Lee] has 9\1/4\ 
minutes remaining, and the gentleman from Florida [Mr. McCOLLUM] has 
7\3/4\ minutes remaining.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the 
gentleman from Texas [Mr. Turner].
  Mr. TURNER. Mr. Chairman, I came to Congress after having served in 
the Texas Senate where last session we passed what I believed to be one 
of the toughest juvenile justice reforms in the Nation. Now I come to 
Congress and find that this Congress, in H.R. 3, is going to tell the 
State of Texas that our tough juvenile justice bill is not good enough, 
not good enough to qualify for the Federal funds that we want to 
provide.
  The legislatures in the 50 States do not need the Congress telling 
them how to run the juvenile justice system. We have a letter that we 
received today from the National Conference of State Legislatures 
opposing the mandates of H.R. 3.
  In Texas we have gotten tough on crime and we have also recognized 
that we must invest in prevention of juvenile crime. We must begin the 
process of investing in early childhood intervention, in supporting our 
families and our communities, and being sure we attack the root causes 
of crime, and being sure that our Nation invests in our children.
  This is the role that the Federal Government can fulfill. We need to 
keep our kids off of drugs. We need to keep our streets safe. We need 
to give our children the kind of training that they need in early 
childhood. This is where $1.5 billion in Federal funds needs to be 
spent, not on telling our States that they are not tough enough on 
crime.
  In Texas our Republican governor and our Democratic legislature 
passed tough juvenile justice laws. We do not need the Congress to tell 
them it was not good enough.
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from 
Pennsylvania [Mr. Fox].
  Mr. FOX of Pennsylvania. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman 
from Florida for his leadership on this bill and to make some points 
that I think are relevant as to why it should be supported.
  First, under H.R. 3, prosecutors will have discretion in every case. 
It allows prosecutors in every instance, Mr. Chairman, to either refer 
juvenile offenders to State authorities, prosecute the offender as a 
juvenile, or proceed against the offender as an adult only in the case 
of murder and other serious violent felonies.
  It also should be pointed out that H.R. 3 finds that we will make 
sure that juveniles will not be housed with adults. H.R. 3 expressly 
prohibits housing juveniles with adults.
  Furthermore, under H.R. 3 we have prevention plus. Look at it this 
way, Mr. Chairman, accountability is prevention. As a former assistant 
DA from Pennsylvania, I can tell my colleagues that when youthful 
offenders come to our courts and face consequences for their 
wrongdoing, criminal careers stop before they start. H.R. 3 encourages 
States to provide a sanction for every act of wrongdoing, starting with 
the first offense and increasing in severity with each subsequent 
offense, which is the best method, I submit, for directing youngsters 
away from a path of crime while they still are amenable to such 
encouragements.
  Moreover, this bill is only part of a larger effort to combat 
juvenile crime. The prevention funding in the administration's juvenile 
crime bill falls under the jurisdiction of the Committee on Education 
and the Workforce. That committee will be bringing forth a juvenile 
crime prevention bill in the next several weeks. In addition, that will 
be a significant part of more than $4 billion which will be spent by 
the Federal Government this year on at-risk and delinquent youths.
  The programs we are talking about include 21 gang intervention 
programs, 35 community policing and crime prevention mentoring 
programs, 42 job training assistance programs, 47 counseling programs, 
44 self-sufficiency programs, and 53 substance abuse intervention 
programs.
  Under H.R. 3, local governments will have flexibility. State and 
local governments will be able to have funds to be used for a wide 
variety of juvenile crime fighting activities, ranging from building 
and expanding juvenile detention facilities, and establishing drug 
courts and hiring prosecutors to establish accountability-based 
programs that work with juvenile offenders who are referred by law 
enforcement agencies.
  Mr. Chairman, I ask my colleagues to support H.R. 3.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the 
gentleman from Texas [Mr. Sandlin], a former trial judge in the great 
State of Texas that had juvenile law jurisdiction.
  Mr. SANDLIN. Mr. Chairman, today in this greatest of all countries we 
obviously face a problem, a problem of juvenile crime.
  I rise as the father of four children, a youth baseball, basketball, 
softball coach, a former judge, a former chairman of a juvenile 
committee in Texas. Based upon that experience, I am convinced of one 
thing. Our focus in this Congress and in this country should be on one 
thing. We have kids with problems. We do not have problem kids.
  If we send our children to school hungry, needing medical care, with 
no hope for a quality education, they will not succeed. We cannot 
expect them to succeed, and neither would we succeed under those same 
circumstances.
  As a former judge, I have heard thousands of juvenile cases. 
Thousands. I agree that we need to teach children and juveniles to be 
responsible. Some children absolutely must be incarcerated. But if we 
think that by merely incarcerating children that we are going to solve 
these problems, we are wrong. If we think it will serve as a deterrent, 
we are fooling ourselves.
  I will tell my colleagues one thing I learned as a judge. Children 
are fearless. They are fearless. They make no connection like adults do 
between the commission and what happens.
  I have heard a lot of talk tonight about there is nothing that 
happens on the first offense or second offense. I do not know about 
anywhere else, but in Texas that is not so. That is absolutely not so.
  Treating children as adults and spending more and more and more tax 
dollars to prosecute children and locking them up without addressing 
the problems that are underlying those juvenile problems is just false 
investment and it simply will not work. If we are committed to solving 
the juvenile problem in this country, we need to sponsor legislation 
that creates jobs, that puts families first, that sponsors education, 
that supports intervention.
  Do we need to be tough on crime? We sure do. I have compared H.R. 3 
and the Democratic substitute. I have noticed the Democratic 
substitute, the Juvenile Offender Control and Prevention Act, extends 
the age at which juveniles may be incarcerated, expands the use of 
Federal juvenile records and funds police officers, but it is balanced 
in a way that H.R. 3 is not.
  These are local problems, these are local programs funded by local 
families. We do not need a Washington mandate to tell Texans what to do 
about Texas problems. It will not work.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the 
gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Pascrell], a very strong advocate of 
this issue and a member of the task force.
  Mr. PASCRELL. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me 
this time. I rise in strong opposition to H.R. 3 and in support of the 
Democratic substitute.

[[Page H2331]]

  We in Government have no higher responsibility to those we serve than 
to provide for the protection and to do all within our power to make 
our streets and neighborhoods safe.

                              {time}  2130

  We owe it to our constituents to confront the issues of crime head-
on, not just chest pounding and tough talk. That is why I rise today in 
support of the Democratic substitute to the juvenile justice bill. Our 
substitute represents the only real balanced approach to solving the 
problem of youth violence. In contrast to our balanced approach, the 
bill of the gentleman from Florida [Mr. McCollum] takes the most 
extreme approach to juvenile justice reform and is filled with tough-
sounding provisions which have never been proven to reduce violent 
crime.
  The bill of the gentleman from Florida [Mr. McCollum] provides 
absolutely no funding for initiatives that focus on preventing crimes 
before they occur because 98 percent of young people in this country do 
the right thing. Those are the kids we should be supporting and worried 
about. I have had to deal with youth violence on a day-to-day basis. I 
understand the fight that we are facing. In Paterson, NJ, we were able 
to reduce crime 36 percent in 6 years. We did not achieve this 
reduction by tough talk and posturing. We had the folks on the streets 
to work with the folks that walk the streets, the brothers and sisters 
in blue. We achieved it by taking real steps, implementing real 
prevention and community policing initiatives.
  After I was elected, I formed a public safety advisory committee 
composed of police officers, prosecutors, judicial officials and others 
who have had great success in crime fighting, Mr. Chairman. I charged 
them with the task of reviewing our current juvenile justice system. An 
interesting thing happened last week. When I asked the committee to 
reconvene and share their opinions, to a person, every one of them 
acknowledged that there is a real need to be tough on these juveniles 
committing violent crimes. We should concentrate on how we prevent kids 
from ever becoming involved in crime in the first place.
  They expressed the belief that we must concentrate on keeping young 
children from ever getting into crime. That is just what the Democratic 
substitute does. Our legislation cracks down on gangs and juvenile drug 
dealers and prescribes harsh graduated penalties for those convicted of 
crimes. We must recognize that only a very small handful of youths are 
convicted of crimes. In here, in a very specific article in Jersey, 
ordered to reduce the juvenile jail crowding in our State.
  This is not how you fight crime. It is how you pound your chest and 
get people to think that you are doing something about it and you are 
not.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the 
gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Watt].
  Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I just wanted to clarify 
something that the gentleman from Florida [Mr. McCollum], the chairman 
of the Subcommittee on Crime, said. He said he had these conferences, 
hearings all around the country. I think he said he had six of them. I 
was at one of those hearings myself. The information I recall hearing 
was almost identical to what the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Sandlin], 
the juvenile judge, who just ceased being a juvenile judge, said at 
that hearing.
  I wanted to yield to the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Scott]. He 
attended almost all of these hearings. My recollection is just 
different from our chairman's about what people were saying at these 
hearings. I wondered if the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Scott] might 
tell us what his recollection of those hearings was.
  Mr. SCOTT. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield, I would say 
that at some of those hearings, we found the need to try some juveniles 
as adults, but the fact is that without any change in the law, most 
juveniles tried as adults today are tried as adults for nonviolent 
offenses. That is, we have gone all the way down the list of offenses, 
and they are already being tried as adults and they will not be 
affected by this legislation.
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from 
California [Mr. Riggs], the distinguished chairman of the key 
subcommittee of the Committee on Education and the Workforce.
  Mr. RIGGS. Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to join the debate. All I have 
to tell my colleagues is that this debate feels a little bit like deja 
vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra. Unfortunately when we debate 
crime-related issues in the House, we seem to get into the yin and yang 
of Republican politics and we seem to promote this notion that 
punishment and prevention are mutually exclusive.
  I actually despair listening to the debate that sometimes I think 
there are those Republicans, my Republican colleagues, who would be 
inclined obviously to vote for a punishment bill but against a 
prevention bill, and perhaps it is the other way around on this side of 
the aisle with some of our Democratic colleagues who might be more 
inclined to vote for a prevention bill but have real reservations, some 
of which we have heard tonight and for very legitimate reasons, about a 
punishment bill.
  Be that as it may, I am very pleased to tell my colleagues that I am 
happy to be teaming up with the gentleman from Florida [Mr. McCollum], 
the chairman. We want an approach that is tough on punishment but smart 
on prevention.
  A few weeks ago we were out in southern California, we heard from the 
police chief there in Westminster and Orange County, CA, Jim Cook, who 
is running a model program that is targeted on gang suppression. He 
told us: Look, before you can even talk about prevention, you have got 
to get the worst of the worst, the bad actors, if you will, off the 
streets.
  Another person used this analogy of a running bathtub, that you could 
pull the plug but of course the bathtub would not drain unless you 
turned off the faucet. That is of course where prevention comes into 
play. It is just really critically important.
  So while I support the notion of graduated sanctions, realize that by 
conditioning Federal grant funding to the States on graduated 
sanctions, that creates an even greater strain on the juvenile justice 
system infrastructure and, hopefully, obviously we can be part of the 
solution there in providing more funding for juvenile justice housing 
and then for the whole, all of the services in the juvenile justice 
system from police, to probation, to the courts, more prosecutors and 
defenders.
  While we want to do all of that, we again have to take a prevention 
approach. I agree with my colleague on a bipartisan basis, speaking as 
another former street cop who worked the streets for 8 years that we 
are not going to arrest our way out of this problem. Therefore, we are 
hard at work in our Subcommittee on Children, Youth and Families on a 
juvenile justice and delinquency prevention bill. We hope that we can 
bring it to the floor actually about the same time as we bring the 
vocational education bill which will also be targeted at young people 
who are at risk of dropping out or at risk of coming into contact with 
the juvenile justice system, the great majority of our young people, by 
the way, who are not college bound or who, if they go to college, will 
not complete college.
  I really do believe we can bring a good bill out here on prevention 
that will take an interagency and multidisciplinary approach that will 
require the schools, the police, the prosecutors, probation and 
community-based organizations to work together to design the right 
crime-fighting and delinquency prevention strategies for their 
communities that we can hopefully drive the resources locally to 
encourage flexibility and innovation.
  Again I ask Members to be aware as we conclude general debate tonight 
and approach debate on amendments and obviously votes leading up to 
final passage tomorrow that the gentleman from Florida [Mr. McCollum], 
the chairman, again and I are very, very committed to taking a 
cooperative approach. I personally want to make it a bipartisan one, as 
I think the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Scott] would attest, since we 
have been in discussions over a period now of several weeks and hope 
ultimately that through our combined efforts we can show our 
constituents, and show the

[[Page H2332]]

country that we are serious about cracking down on juvenile crime but 
we recognize ultimately prevention is the answer.
  We have got to focus more time, more resources on those young people 
who are at risk of coming into contact with the juvenile justice system 
or who, if they are in the juvenile justice system, can through 
intensive services hopefully be diverted out of the juvenile justice 
system before they graduate to adult crimes and adult prisons.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of 
my time.
  Mr. Chairman, I wish I could come to this well and simply say that we 
had reached an accommodation. I think what we have really reached is 
that this bill should be pulled and we should join the gentleman from 
California [Mr. Riggs] with the prevention bill that he is now 
proposing, simply because that is the emphasis that we should have.
  Statistics already show in the State of the gentleman from Florida 
[Mr. McCollum] that those juveniles housed in those adult facilities, 
the recidivism rate is higher than any other group of juveniles. In 
this bill we have no protection for juveniles who might be raped. We 
have no language that protects juveniles from the abuse that occurs 
when housing them with adults. In this bill only 12 States might 
qualify.
  In this bill, if 23 other States increase their penalties, they still 
would not qualify. In this bill, the block grant moneys can be used for 
prison construction but they cannot be used for money for prevention.
  This bill is not supported by the administration. This bill does not 
allow for judicial review, some sensitivity and discretion to decide 
whether juveniles should be transferred to the adult court. We, too, 
want to be not soft on crime, we want to prevent crime, but we realize 
with juveniles there is value, as the Concerned Alliance of Men said, 
to giving them a hug.
  I think this bill is misdirected, wrongheaded, going in the wrong 
direction. When we ask the question simply, what would I want to happen 
to my own child, when we ask that question, then we have the answer. 
This not H.R. 3.
  What we are doing to the children of America is not rehabilitating 
them. What we are doing to the American people is simply saying that 
Washington knows best. When we do the right thing, unless it is as 
hard, harsh and detrimental as we want in Washington, we will not do it 
and allow them to have the discretion to do the right thing in their 
States. This bill does not respond to the needs of Americans and 
certainly it says take the $64,000 and lock them up rather than the 
$4,000 to prevent crime and give them an early head start.
  Mr. Chairman, I would ask that we support the Democratic substitute 
and that we do the right thing on behalf of our juveniles in this 
country and embrace them and save them and prevent crime.
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time.
  The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from Florida is recognized for 1\3/4\ 
minutes.
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Chairman, I would like my colleagues to understand 
what I do, I think, about all of this debate tonight and, that is, that 
most kids are good kids, and nobody is going to dispute that. Most 
Americans do not commit crimes. In fact, as the gentleman from 
California [Mr. Riggs] said earlier, we want to get at those and 
prevent crimes as much as possible. There is a bill coming out that 
will work on that from his committee very shortly.
  We also have a lot of other programs as we mentioned by the gentleman 
from Pennsylvania [Mr. Fox] directed at prevention. This does not mean, 
though, that we should not have an improvement in the juvenile justice 
system of this Nation that is broken and is not working for those who 
do commit crimes, and if they are the most heinous of crimes, the 
murderers, the rapes, the robberies that unfortunately some who are 
slightly under 18 do commit, and the most egregious of all crimes some 
of these kids who are frankly quite a bit older in this regard than 
they act in some of the movies, I think those kids ought to be taken up 
and locked up and treated as adults. Yes, there is a high recidivism 
rate among those kids who commit these kind of crime. It is going to be 
because they are the worst of the worst and they are going to be 
hardest to rehabilitate. They are the ones we are probably not going to 
rehabilitate. But the truth is we need to correct the juvenile justice 
system not so much for those kids, though we need to lock those up or 
encourage the States to do that. We need to get at the kids in the 
juvenile justice system just like the prevention programs the gentleman 
from California [Mr. Riggs] is going to bring out who have not yet 
quite gotten there, who have committed the less serious offenses, the 
vandalization of homes, the spray painting of buildings, and so forth, 
and have sanctions imposed on those kids so they will understand there 
are consequences to their misbehavior. I am convinced from listening to 
experts all over this country that kids who understand there are 
consequences when they really are in the system do not commit a lot of 
other acts they otherwise would. We will have far fewer juvenile 
criminals in the system if we put consequences of sanctions on minor 
offenses back into the system again. That is what this bill does. It 
repairs the juvenile justice system with an incentive grant program.
  We need to pass H.R. 3 tomorrow. I encourage my colleagues to do it 
for that reason.
  Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Chairman, given the growing concern of American 
citizens over the juvenile crime problem, we need to carefully examine 
this issue and its root causes and look for ways not just to punish 
juvenile offenders, but for ways in which we can prevent children from 
becoming criminals in the first place.
  Some of my colleagues believe that the very least we must do to 
address our juvenile crime problem is to lock up violent juveniles. I 
have no argument with incarcerating violent offenders, but to my mind, 
the very least we must do is to attempt to stop these kids before they 
become violent offenders. Locking up more and more kids is not the 
answer. We cannot afford it and eventually these kids will get out.
  And what will happen when they do get out? We will have a group of 
young adults who have spent many of their formative years in jail. What 
can we logically expect them to have learned there except for how to be 
better and more dangerous criminals?
  Yet now, in the current political climate where no penalty is ever 
considered too severe, many of my colleagues want to treat kids as 
adults and lock them up for longer and longer periods--even though 
study after study has shown that this approach is totally ineffective.
  Traditionally, juvenile court judges have given juveniles longer 
sentences than the judges in adult courts. The worst offenders at the 
juvenile level may often appear quite tame compared to what the 
criminal courts see every day.
  Anyway, all of the talk about treating younger and younger offenders 
as adults misses the point. It is too little too late.
  We need to deal with kids before they become violent offenders, not 
after. The Rand Corporation--hardly a bastion of liberalism--has 
recently issued a report demonstrating that crime prevention efforts 
aimed at disadvantaged kids are more effective than tough prison terms 
in keeping our citizenry safe. Since this study doesn't play that well 
politically, I guess we are just going to ignore it.
  As adults, we need to take more responsibility for our country's 
juvenile crime problem. Children are not born criminals, we make them 
into criminals either through our neglect or our mistreatment or a lack 
of economic opportunities.
  We are treating juveniles more harshly at the same time as we are 
spending less on their education, less on after-school and development 
programs, and less on child protective services.
  We are also allowing our children to be exposed to more and more 
violence, not only on television, at the movies and in popular music, 
but in the streets, at school, and even in their own homes. A 
significant majority also refuses to stand up to the National Rifle 
Association and acknowledge the danger guns pose to our youth, despite 
the large number of teenagers (not to mention adults) killed by gun 
violence every year.
  In fact, at the juvenile crime meetings Chairman McCollum convened 
around the country last Congress, without fail at every one of those 
meetings--in Philadelphia, in Atlanta, in Boston, in Chicago, in 
Dallas, and in San Francisco--local officials have noted the problem of 
juveniles and guns and urged Federal action on this front. Yet Mr. 
McCollum's bill does absolutely nothing to limit juvenile access to 
handguns. I guess the Republicans are only interested in addressing 
juvenile crime in ways that pass NRA scrutiny.

[[Page H2333]]

  Although the 1994 crime bill authorized funding for numerous 
prevention programs, since the Republicans gained the majority, none of 
that money has been appropriated. Therefore, it cannot be argued that 
prevention has failed. We haven't even begun to try prevention 
programs. Before we lose an entire generation to the criminal justice 
system, we have an obligation to make every effort to assist children 
in making the right choices and to offer them meaningful alternatives 
to crime.
  As with guns, at Chairman McCollum's juvenile crime meetings around 
the country, local officials stressed the importance of prevention 
programs and Mr. McCollum professed to agree that prevention programs 
are a necessary part of the effort to stem crime. Yet the bill we 
consider here today offers little in the way of prevention.
  The lock 'em up approach taken by H.R. 3 will do little if anything 
to stem the rising tide of juvenile crime with which the majority 
professes to be so concerned. Once again, we are trying to fool the 
American public into thinking we are doing something about crime when 
we are actually only politicizing crime. If this bill becomes law and 
the juvenile crime rate fails to decrease, we will have only ourselves 
to blame for the further public disillusionment and cynicism about 
politics as well as for the escalating juvenile crime problem.
  The CHAIRMAN. All time for general debate has expired.
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Chairman, I move that the Committee do now rise.
  The motion was agreed to.
  Accordingly, the Committee rose; and the Speaker pro tempore [Mr. 
Gilchrest] having assumed the chair, Mr. Kingston, Chairman of the 
Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union, reported that 
that Committee, having had under consideration the bill (H.R. 3) to 
combat violent youth crime and increase accountability for juvenile 
criminal offenses, had come to no resolution thereon.

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