[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 22 (Tuesday, February 10, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S882-S883]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                             PRISON REFORM

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, as tempted as I am to respond to my good 
friend from Maryland about the ongoing Democratic filibuster of the 
Homeland Security funding, I want to spend just a few minutes talking 
about a topic where there is broad and growing consensus, where both 
parties have found common ground, and I am talking about the issue of 
reforming America's prison system.
  Pretty much everyone agrees that our prisons are dangerously 
overcrowded. I think there are roughly 215,000 inmates in Federal 
custody. And everyone pretty much agrees that by and large people who 
are in prison are someday going to get out of prison. That, of course, 
brings about the concern about repeat crimes or recidivism and the fact 
that it is way too high. I think in many instances it is because we 
have simply not done enough or maybe have even given up on helping 
transition people who actually want to transition to a more productive 
life and providing them with the tools they need to do so.
  The hard part about dealing with what I have just described is we 
have to come up with a solution that addresses these problems without 
jeopardizing public safety. That, obviously, is a given. It is a 
challenge, to be sure, but it makes it even more important to find 
bipartisan consensus and to actually accomplish what we can.
  It is in this vein that my colleague from Rhode Island, Senator 
Whitehouse, and I have joined together to introduce a piece of 
legislation we call the Corrections Oversight, Recidivism Reduction, 
and Eliminating Costs for Taxpayers in Our National System Act--or 
CORRECTIONS Act--to reform our Federal prison system. That is quite an 
acronym. It is a mouthful to be sure. But the point is, this is real 
meaningful reform of our prison system at the Federal level.

  Before I describe the specifics of the CORRECTIONS Act, I am going to 
tell a brief story the Presiding Officer is very familiar with of the 
success in that laboratory of democracy known as the State of Texas.
  Not too long ago Texas lawmakers confronted a problem similar to what 
I have described here at the national level. We had not only growing 
budgets for prison construction, we had overcrowded prisons and a high 
rate of criminal recidivism.
  At some point the thought occurred to a group of people that just 
building more prisons wasn't necessarily the answer. It certainly 
wouldn't fix the problem on the back end that I described, of people 
who would eventually get out of prison not being prepared to reenter 
civil society. But we tried a different approach in Texas: scrapping 
prison construction plans and instead funding a series of recidivism 
reduction programs aimed at helping low-risk offenders turn their lives 
around and become productive members of society and, just as important, 
not become residents of our prison system once again. These programs 
are not all that novel. They are well known--things such as drug 
rehabilitation, educational classes, job training, faith-based 
initiatives, and something as simple as prison work programs.
  In Texas we gave qualified inmates the option of earning credits and 
completing a portion of their sentence in lower levels of custody--home 
confinement, halfway houses, community supervision--which is 
dramatically cheaper than the big-box prisons that are very expensive.
  The results speak for themselves. Between 2007 and 2012 our State's 
overall incarceration rate fell almost 10 percent--9.4 percent--our 
total crime rate dropped 16 percent, and taxpayers saved more than $2 
billion.
  Again, the Presiding Officer knows as well, Texas has a certain 
reputation when it comes to crime. We are not soft on crime. We are 
tough on crime. We believe if you do the crime, you should do the time. 
But I think what we have come up with is a model that can be used at 
the national level.
  Senator Whitehouse this morning, in a press conference we did 
together, talked about how similar initiatives that took place in Rhode 
Island produced similar results. But I think one of the keys to this is 
the recidivism reduction programs because these have proven successful 
for medium-risk and low-risk inmates and delivered positive results.
  This bill would also make a number of other reforms. I guess perhaps 
the most important, and the first one I will mention, is a risk 
assessment program, regular risk assessments for inmates, to determine 
whether they are a low, medium or high risk of recidivism. Indeed, we 
would not allow high-risk inmates to participate in this program of 
earning good time credit toward less restrictive custody, but they 
could, if they were motivated enough to change their status from high 
risk to medium risk. They could then begin that. So the incentives are 
clearly there.
  These assessments would assign prisoners to appropriate programming 
to ensure the system is working efficiently and effectively. In other 
words, if someone has a mental health issue, obviously they would be 
directed in a particular way. If somebody doesn't have employable job 
skills, obviously that would call for some training program so they 
could acquire those kinds of skills. People who have drug and alcohol 
problems obviously could be directed toward something that could help 
them learn to free themselves from those challenges.
  To me, one of the great things about this particular approach is that 
it operates on incentives. As an incentive, lower risk offenders who 
successfully complete their programs would earn up to 25 percent of 
their remaining sentence in home confinement or a halfway house.
  To be clear, these earned time credits would be available only to 
inmates who have been vetted by the Bureau of Prisons and classified as 
low-risk offenders. The Nation's most violent offenders would be 
excluded from earning any credit under this legislation. During these 
budget-constrained times, it is important to point out that this bill 
would not involve any additional spending. Instead, it would rely on 
job programs and partnerships of faith-based groups and nonprofits, and 
the reinvestment potentially of the savings generated by transitioning 
lower risk offenders to less restrictive forms of custody.
  If it works as it has at the State level, it is going to save money 
because we will be building fewer prisons. Indeed, in Texas I believe 
we have actually shuttered three existing prison units because we 
simply don't need them because of this new approach.
  Make no mistake, though, the prisoners eligible for these program are 
all people who eventually will get out of prison anyway. What we are 
trying to do is make sure the very high risk of repeating and 
recidivism would go down by better preparing them to reenter society. 
Our goal would be to make it less likely that they would commit new 
crimes and wind up behind bars again.
  So the hope and expectation is this bill would go a long way toward 
improving public safety, it would save taxpayers money, and it would 
ease some of the burden on our Federal prisons just like we experienced 
in Texas.
  This bill, at a time when we seem to be very divided on a number of 
topics, is a consensus piece of legislation. It was voted out of the 
Judiciary Committee late last year by an overwhelming vote. I think 
those who expressed some reservations at the time just wanted more 
opportunity to talk about it and learn more about it, and perhaps they 
had other ideas they wanted to consider adding to it.
  In addition to Senator Whitehouse, there have been a number of 
colleagues who have been very interested in criminal justice reform, 
and this is just one place, one starting point, which I think enjoys 
perhaps the broadest consensus. But I don't think we ought to be afraid 
of the larger discussion that a number of our colleagues, including the 
Presiding Officer, have talked about--things such as mandatory 
minimums, sentencing reforms; the overcriminalization of our regulatory 
regime, where people who inadvertently violate some regulation find 
themselves actually accused of a crime.
  I think all of these are fair game, but I think the most important 
thing for us to do is to start--start somewhere--where there is a broad 
consensus. Let's get done what we can get done, and let's not let the 
perfect be the enemy of the good.
  I think if we can establish, both from the Judiciary Committee and 
then on the floor of the Senate, that we are capable of moving 
bipartisan legislation

[[Page S883]]

such as this forward and sending it to the President for his signature, 
hopefully we will start a growing trend of doing that, and this will be 
the beginning, and not the end, of our discussions and hopefully our 
productivity when it comes to criminal justice reform.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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