[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 155 (Monday, October 17, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6573-S6574]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
NATIONAL CRIMINAL JUSTICE COMMISSION ACT
Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I wish to thank my colleague from Oklahoma
for giving me the courtesy of speaking, and I thank him again for the
work he has done on the Foreign Relations Committee, Subcommittee on
East Asian Affairs, where he is the ranking Republican, and the other
work he has done on the Armed Services Committee.
Today I rise to speak about the National Criminal Justice Commission
legislation which I introduced more than 2 years ago and which the
leader and the managers of this bill are now going to offer as an
amendment to the pending legislation. First of all, I thank the leader
and the managers of the bill for calling up this legislation. I also
thank my principal Republican cosponsor, Senator Lindsey Graham, for
all the work he has done.
There are good national commissions and bad national commissions and
redundant national commissions and sometimes there are national
commissions which are not only needed but vital to the resolution of
issues we face.
I am thinking, as I speak, of the first Commission on Wartime
Contracting which Senator Claire McCaskill and I introduced 4 years ago
and which resulted in a finding of approximately $30 billion in fraud,
waste, and abuse in contracts that had gone to Iraq and Afghanistan and
which provided a model for the way we should be approaching such
contracts in the future. I would put this particular national
commission in that category. It was put together after much thought and
many hearings. It is paid for, it is sunsetted at 18 months, and it is
dedicated to helping us resolve an issue of very serious national
purpose.
I began on this issue before I came to the Senate--the issue of the
imbalance in our criminal justice system and the need to bring a
comprehensive resolution in terms of how we handle crime and reentry in
this country. We have had more than 2\1/2\ years of hearings since I
came to the Senate. After I introduced this legislation, we met--at
staff levels, since I am not on the Judiciary Committee--with
representatives from more than 100 different organizations across the
country and across the philosophical spectrum.
This chart is an indication of the type of support we have received
for this commission. I will not read the names, and I don't expect
anyone viewing the TV screen to be able to read all the names, but this
is an unusual circumstance. We have organizations as philosophically
diverse as the ACLU, the NAACP, the Sentencing Project, the National
Organization for Victim Assistance, the ABA Criminal Justice Section,
the National Center for Victims of Crime, along with the Fraternal
Order of Police, the National Sheriffs Association, and the
International Association of Chiefs of Police, which all agree we need
to step forward and examine our criminal justice system in a
comprehensive way, from point of apprehension to point of return, so
that we make better use of our assets and make better use of our own
people, quite frankly.
Today we incarcerate more people than any other country in the
Western world or in any known country in the world. We have 2.3 million
people in our prisons and jails and another 5 million people on
probation or in some way under postcorrectional management. Hundreds of
thousands of people are being released from jails and prisons every
year and reentering society, and at this point we are without a
comprehensive structure that will allow those who wish to become
productive citizens again the opportunity to have the right kind of
transition.
At the same time, we have 7 million people under some form of
correctional supervision or in prisons and we don't feel any safer.
This is the other beam our analysis has ridden as we looked at this.
Even today, if we ask Americans, two-thirds of the people in this
country believe crime is more prevalent today than it was a year ago.
So we were tasked--we tasked ourselves--with looking at this problem
to try to figure out how we can do a better job of addressing the issue
of criminal justice, spending less money. We are now in a situation
where State and local budgets have been stretched to the breaking
point. Professor Western of Harvard estimates that annual correctional
spending right now is about $70 billion, with State spending on
corrections increasing 40 percent over the past 20 years.
We are witnessing a war on our border with respect to gang warfare.
Since President Calderon launched an offensive against drug gangs and
cartels in 2006, tens of thousands of people have died in drug
trafficking violence along the border. It is estimated that these
cartels are now operating in more than 230 cities and towns in the
United States. These entities need to be examined in the context of
transnational gang activity as they relate to our criminal justice
system.
We are also largely housing our Nation's mentally ill in our prison
system. The number of mentally ill in prison right now is nearly five
times the number of mentally ill in inpatient mental hospitals. Noted
experts have cited jails and prisons as the No. 1 holding facility for
the mentally ill.
So the conclusion we reached, after listening to dozens of
representatives from different organizations across the philosophical
spectrum, was that we need to have a long-overdue, top-to-bottom,
beginning-to-end examination of how the criminal justice system works
in the United States from point of apprehension to the decision of
whether to arrest. And, if arrested, what sort of port does a person go
into? How long should that person be in prison? What should prison
administration look like, and how could that be better adapted? What
models do we have out there that can be applied? What should reentry
programs look like, and how do we deal with the ever-increasing
problems of transnational gangs? We need to examine all of those pieces
together.
The last review of this nature that was undertaken was done in 1965
by President Lyndon Johnson. So I introduced the National Criminal
Justice Act, the goal of which is to create a blue ribbon national
commission, time sunsetted--18 months--to get the finest minds in the
country together to examine these different pieces and to come back to
the Congress with specific recommendations for reforming our national
criminal justice system.
Just last week, in a meeting of the Senate law Enforcement Caucus,
Philadelphia Police Chief Charles Ramsey noted the tremendous influence
of this last commission's report, which was reported in 1967--44 years
ago--and voiced strong support for the creation of a new commission. We
are long overdue to look at what works and what doesn't in our criminal
justice system.
This bill has, quite frankly, struck a nerve across the country. I
have heard from citizens across all 50 States in support of this
initiative. I mentioned
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the list of supporting organizations, including judges, lawyers,
police, public health officials, educators, academics, prisoners, civil
rights organizations, and people who are simply concerned about making
our criminal justice system better, more fair, and more adaptable to
solving the issues of the true criminal population in the United
States.
So, again, I express my appreciation to Majority Leader Reid for
working with the managers of this bill and bringing this amendment to
the pending legislation, and I trust that it will be a
noncontroversial, $5 million, paid-for study that will, in the end,
help us resolve the many fallacies that now pervade our criminal
justice system.
I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Oklahoma.
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