[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 150 (Thursday, December 7, 2000)]
[House]
[Pages H12041-H12043]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




    ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIME DURING THE PAST 6 YEARS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 1999, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. McCollum) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Speaker, I do not intend to take the full 60 
minutes, but I do want to take a portion of this time to take this 
opportunity to comment on something that I think is very important. I 
have had the privilege of serving as the chairman of the Subcommittee 
on Crime of the Committee on the Judiciary in the House of 
Representatives for the last 6 years. I will not have that privilege 
further. My tenure normally would come to an end, rotating under the 
rules of the House at the end of this Congress in any event, but as 
many of my colleagues know, I will be leaving this body, and it has 
been a great privilege to have served in that capacity.
  I want to comment a few minutes about the work of the Subcommittee on 
Crime these past 6 years and to pay tribute to those committee staffers 
on that subcommittee who have worked so hard to make it possible for 
many of the legislative products and the oversight hearings to be 
accomplished, and to also pay tribute to some of the committee staff 
who worked for me while I have served in various capacities in years 
gone by on the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services.
  Over the last three Congresses, the Subcommittee on Crime has 
compiled a tremendous record of accomplishment. In that time, 884 bills 
were referred to the subcommittee. The subcommittee had formal hearings 
on 75 of those bills and, after markup, reported 71 of them to the full 
Committee on Judiciary. Of those, 41 bills eventually were passed by 
both Houses and signed into law by the President. Some of those bills 
that did not get signed into law in their own right, were incorporated 
into appropriations bills and then signed into law.
  So in more than 41 different ways, over the past 6 years, legislation 
crafted by the members of the Subcommittee on Crime have contributed to 
our country, making it a better place to live; one that is safer and 
more just for all our citizens.
  Over the last 3 years, the Subcommittee on Crime has also held 111 
days of hearings on a wide variety of subjects. I take pride in the 
fact that the subcommittee has held a hearing on almost every bill that 
it has marked up in order to ensure that the Members of the 
subcommittee were fully informed about that bill.
  The subcommittee has also a distinguished record of achievement in 
the area of oversight. And the vast majority of these 111 days of 
hearings have been oversight hearings into specific problems in 
criminal justice or hearings into activities and operations of the 
executive branch law enforcement agencies over which the Committee on 
the Judiciary has jurisdiction. These oversight hearings included 
hearings on the work of the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the 
DEA, the Secret Service, and the U.S. Marshals Service.
  Perhaps foremost and most remembered of the hearings that the 
subcommittee held in the last number of years were the 10 days of 
hearings it held into the activities of law enforcement agencies 
towards the Branch Davidians at Waco. These were joint hearings we held 
in conjunction with another subcommittee of the House. I think those 
hearings are remembered for a good reason. The hearings made the public 
aware of the many errors in judgment and tactics of the Federal 
Government during the investigation of the Branch Davidians, as well as 
dispelling the rumors as to the true cause of the fire that took the 
lives of the Davidians.
  Just recently, there has been a special commission the President set 
up to study this measure, review it once more, and the conclusions of 
that effort that was undertaken have resulted in precisely a 
confirmation of the findings of this joint committee hearing that my 
subcommittee took part in.

                              {time}  1645

  I was very pleased with the extensive report and findings and 
recommendations prepared by the committee. I note that the subsequent 
investigations have not altered those basic findings, which I think 
proves the thoroughness of those hearings. I would also note that the 
hearings were the occasion for observing, even in the midst of tragedy, 
the valor of Federal law enforcement agents.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to take a few minutes to note some of the 
legislation that was passed by the subcommittee. Many aspects of the 
Contract with America in 1995 involved the Subcommittee on Crime. 
Provisions of legislation that were crafted and revised by the 
subcommittee that are in effect today from that Contract with America 
are the local Law Enforcement and Block Grant Program, which gives 
localities millions of dollars each year in flexible grants that they 
can direct resources to the places of greatest need for law enforcement 
purposes, where the decision making is done at the local level not at 
the Federal level but how those monies are spent; the Truth in 
Sentencing Prison Construction Grant Program, which encourages States 
to ensure that violent prisoners serve most of their sentence imposed 
by a court and provides them with monies and resources to build a 
prison space and to support those prison beds in return for agreeing to 
require at least 85 percent of a sentence be served; the Federal 
Mandatory Minimum Restitution Law that requires victims in Federal 
criminal cases to make restitution to their victims; and the historic 
changes in the habeas corpus process which has helped ensure certainty 
and finality in our criminal justice system and provides a sense of 
closure to victims of crime.
  Over the last 6 years, the subcommittee has worked on a great number 
of bills which have become law and have helped to protect our citizens. 
It has worked extensively to reinvigorate the war on drugs with a goal 
of increasing prospects of all of our children leading drug-free, 
productive lives.
  The subcommittee has helped to enact legislation that increases the 
penalties for trafficking of methamphetamine, one of the most dangerous 
drugs facing our society today;

[[Page H12042]]

criminalizes the use of the so-called date-rape drugs, and provides 
greater resources for the law enforcement agencies whose mission it is 
to combat the flow of illegal drugs into the country.
  The subcommittee also has enacted several laws to protect our 
children and other vulnerable members of our society, such as ``Megan's 
Law,'' which requires States to put in place a system to track the 
whereabouts of convicted sex offenders; the Sexual Crimes Against 
Children Act; and the Child Protection and Sexual Predator Punishment 
Act of 1998, which focuses on the problems of sex crimes against 
children and the use of computers and the Internet to commit those 
crimes by punishing severely those who commit them; and the Internet 
Stalking Punishment and Prevention Act of 1996 to punish those who 
would use the Internet to stalk their victims.
  We also worked on several laws to protect our citizens from fraud, 
including the Cellular Telephone Protection Act of 1997, which 
prohibited the sale of devices used to clone wireless telephones; the 
Telemarketing Fraud Prevention Act of 1997, which helped protect 
persons, especially our seniors, from telemarketing fraud; the Identity 
Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act of 1997, which makes it a crime to 
traffic in personal identifying information; and the Economic Espionage 
Act of 1996, which protects our commercial sector from those who would 
steal the business innovations that have helped fuel our economy.
  We have also worked in the subcommittee to protect law enforcement 
officers who risk their lives daily to protect our society as well as 
their families who also bear this risk. The subcommittee worked to 
enact the Care for Police Survivors Act of 1998 and the Police Fire and 
Emergency Officers Educational Assistance Act of 1998 to provide 
educational benefits to the families of public safety officers killed 
or disabled in the line of duty; the Bulletproof Vest Partnership Act 
of 1997, which was renewed this year to ensure that States have 
sufficient funding to buy protective vests for law enforcement 
officers; and the Correctional Officers Health Safety Act of 1998 to 
mandate that correctional officers who come in contact with the bodily 
fluids of inmates may learn the HIV status of those inmates.
  The Subcommittee on Crime has also enacted prison litigation reform 
legislation to ensure that prisoners do not tie up our court systems 
with frivolous litigation.
  I am also pleased this Congress that the subcommittee worked 
extensively to close the gaping hole in our Federal criminal 
jurisdiction in some areas that some cases have allowed very serious 
crimes committed outside the United States by American employees of the 
Defense Department or the American dependents of our service personnel 
to go unpunished. This hole was closed by the passage of the Military 
Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000, and that is long overdue.
  Also this Congress we passed bipartisan legislation to eliminate the 
crime backlog of crime scene samples awaiting DNA analysis. The passage 
of the DNA Backlog Elimination Act will help make our system even more 
just by providing greater certainty in the outcome of thousands of 
criminal cases.
  I also would like to note a couple of bills that did not become law 
but that we worked extensively on and one that did that was a part of 
another bill. We had a bill dealing with the Drug Elimination Act of a 
couple of years ago that was an extensive piece of legislation 
incorporated into a larger omnibus spending bill at the close of the 
last Congress that, if fully implemented, was designed and would I 
think reduce the flow of drugs into this country by a significant 
margin, maybe as much as 85 percent, over the next several years. 
Unfortunately, not all the funding to go with that legislation has been 
produced.
  We also produced a Juvenile Crime bill that twice has gone to the 
other body and has yet to become law, does not appear likely to in this 
Congress, but which is something in bad need of addressing in the next 
Congress again. This is a bill that is in part incorporated, though, in 
appropriations process in some of the legislative endeavors there. And 
that is a bill to correct a problem with those who are juveniles who 
commit misdemeanor crimes and others at the early stage of their crime 
life and do not get any punishment.
  That is very common today for young people to commit a crime such as 
one of maybe even robbing a car or throwing a rock through a window or 
doing something else that vandalizes and never getting taken to court; 
or if they are, when they are first there, they receive no punishment, 
maybe probation or none at all.
  We learned in a lot of studies that there is a big problem with that. 
Because our juvenile justice system is overworked and they do not give 
this punishment, then there is no deterrent and young people find that 
they come to conclude they are not going to get punished and so they go 
on to commit these crimes and greater crimes and perhaps violent crimes 
down the road.
  And so we attempted to put some accountability into the law by 
providing a block grant program through the local law enforcement 
communities and the States to enhance their juvenile justice systems 
with more prosecutors, more judges, more diversion programs in return 
for the simple commitment on the part of the States to assure that the 
very first misdemeanor crime by a juvenile gets some punishment, be it 
community service or otherwise, and an ever-increasing greater amount 
of punishment thereafter.
  That legislation, as I said, has not become law; but it has at least 
partially been implemented through the appropriations process and I 
certainly hope will get a solution.
  Another major bill that has not gotten all the way through the system 
is one dealing with what we do with our prison system in terms of 
prison industries. We have a problem with that that I do not have the 
time to go into today. But it deals with the fact that we do not have 
very many prisoners working in our prisons compared to the number who 
are there, less than 20 percent at the Federal level, less than 7 
percent at the State level; and yet we see those prisoners who do 
engage in prison industries are far less likely to return to prison 
when they are released than those who do not. And so the legislation 
that we produced in our committee that has yet to become law would 
provide for an opportunity greater than today to bring private industry 
into prisons to employ these prisons on a wider basis, to remove a 
barrier to the understate sale of prison-made goods, and to provide for 
other opportunities in that regard.

  Mr. Speaker, I would like to take the remaining time to thank the 
staff that have worked so hard in the Subcommittee on Crime and 
elsewhere for me and to mention them in particular. They have done an 
enormous task of working for me over the years. Several of them have 
been very, very involved. They deserve the tribute for all that they 
have done. Many of those staff members have been with me for a long 
time.
  Glenn Schmitt and Dan Bryant share the duties of chief counsel. Dan 
Bryant joined the subcommittee in early 1995 and has worked tirelessly 
over the years in many years, including the drug issue and juvenile 
crime and gun control and law enforcement. Glenn Schmitt was with me 
even before on the Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims in 1994 and 
has worked extensively in the area of corrections and computer and 
other high-tech crimes.
  Rick Filkins on our staff joined the full committee in 1997 and 
became a part of the subcommittee in 1999. Carl Thorsen has done a 
tremendous job with us, has joined the subcommittee very recently, was 
on my personal staff. Veronica Eligan works for our subcommittee and 
Jim Rybicki. Without them we could not have done the job.
  Paul McNulty for a number of years served as chief counsel for the 
Subcommittee on Crime from 1995 to 1999. He previously worked when I 
was ranking member of the minority on this subcommittee from 1987 to 
1990, a very talented individual. And we have missed him. He is now 
working for the majority leader.
  Nicole Nason was counsel with us, did a great job. Aerin Dunkle 
Bryant also a tremendous staffer in the past. Audray Clement put in 
over 30 years of service and 20 years as staff assistant on the 
Committee on the Judiciary and worked on the subcommittee before she

[[Page H12043]]

 retired. Kara Norris Smith succeeded her. Carmel Fisk worked for me 
when I was the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Immigration and 
Claims and did a great job and somebody we could not have worked 
without.
  On the Committee on Banking, where I was ranking member of a couple 
of subcommittees when we were in the minority, domestic monetary 
policy, Doyle Bartlett, Gerry Lynam, Anita Bedelis, Mark Brender all 
worked tirelessly on their efforts while I served there. John Heasley 
and Doyle Bartlett worked as my counsels when I was the ranking 
minority member on the Subcommittee on Financial Institutions. And 
Doyle later served as my chief of staff on my personal staff.
  I just similarly cannot pass the opportunity of saying that in the 
tenure that I served here, without those committee staffers and without 
my personal staff to whom I paid tribute earlier in this Congress, it 
would not have been possible to do the things that we have done. And I 
really believe that staff go unrecognized often and they matter a great 
deal.
  It has been a great privilege to have served in this body over these 
20 years. It has been a great privilege to have served with these staff 
members and to have done the work load that we have. I will miss this 
body. There will be other opportunities in the future, I know, to meet 
public service; but I want to thank my colleagues for this privilege 
and great honor of serving here in this institution and thank them 
particularly for allowing me the opportunity to have been the chairman 
of the Subcommittee on Crime and to have worked with these wonderful 
people to craft the legislation I have described.

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