[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 51 (Thursday, March 26, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Page S2034]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


     RECORD EXPUNGEMENT DESIGNED TO ENHANCE EMPLOYMENT (REDEEM) ACT

  Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, earlier this month, Senator Rand Paul and 
I introduced the Record Expungement Designed to Enhance Employment--or 
REDEEM--Act, a bill that takes important new steps to ensure that youth 
and adults caught up in the criminal justice system have an opportunity 
at a second chance to turn their lives around rather than returning to 
a life of crime. I thank Senator Paul for joining with me to craft this 
legislation.
  This important bipartisan legislation would establish much needed, 
sensible, pragmatic reforms that keep kids out of an adult system in 
the first place, protect their privacy so a youthful mistake does not 
haunt young people throughout their lives, and make it less likely that 
low-level nonviolent offenders reoffend.
  As the former mayor of Newark, I believe strongly in holding people 
accountable for breaking our laws, but I also believe it is important 
that we do everything possible to ensure that when people leave prison 
and return to their communities, they have every chance at becoming 
productive members of our society. No one deserves more of an 
opportunity to leave their past behind than our children. Far too 
often, kids are easily manipulated into making a youthful mistake that 
should not follow them for the rest of their lives. That is why I 
advocate that we fix our Nation's broken criminal justice system, a 
system that has taken an unimaginable and I believe unsustainable toll 
on families and communities.
  The United States is home to between 4 and 5 percent of the entire 
globe's population, but we have 25 percent of the world's prison 
population. This phenomenon is unacceptable, that the land of the free 
would have 25 percent of the globe's imprisoned people. What is 
startling about that is the majority of those people are nonviolent 
offenders. In fact, the majority are nonviolent drug offenders.
  This phenomenon has largely emerged since around 1980, a period 
during which the Federal prison population has grown nearly tenfold. 
Since 1980 we have seen a 10-time increase in our prison population. 
The sad reality is that nearly three-quarters of Federal prisoners are 
nonviolent and have no history of violence whatsoever.
  What is worse and what is anguishing is that once they are convicted 
of a crime, American citizens then face daunting obstacles to 
successfully rejoin society, to being able to raise their family, put 
food on the table, provide for themselves. As a result of that, our 
State and Federal prison exits have now become revolving doors, with 
two of every three ex-offenders getting rearrested within 5 years. Two-
thirds of those nonviolent folks leaving our prisons come back within 5 
years.
  When ex-offenders return to prison again and again, they are not just 
paying a price; we all pay the price. We are contributing so much of 
our resources to rearresting the same people over and over, to 
reincarcerating the same people over and over. A recent Pew report 
concluded that if just 10 States cut their recidivism just 10 percent, 
taxpayers would save $470 million--money this Nation could use to 
either return to taxpayers or invest in our crumbling infrastructure.
  To further public safety, reduce recidivism, and protect the future 
of our children, I am proud to reintroduce the REDEEM Act. This bill 
would incentivize States to raise the age of original jurisdiction for 
criminal courts to 18 years old. Trying juveniles who have committed 
low-level, nonviolent crimes as adults is counterproductive. They do 
not emerge from prison reformed and ready to reintegrate into a high 
school. The criminal record they have will not help them as they try to 
get a job. We need a system that treats juveniles toughly and fairly, 
with an eye toward a productive adulthood.
  This change in law is important for protecting our children's 
futures. For kids in the dozen States that treat 17- and even 16-year-
olds as adults, no longer would getting into a schoolyard scuffle 
result in an adult record that could follow an individual for the rest 
of their life, restrict access to a college degree, limit employment 
prospects, and increase the likelihood of engaging in further criminal 
activity.
  The bill would enhance Federal juvenile record confidentiality and 
provide for automatic expungement of records for kids who commit 
nonviolent crimes before they turn 15 and automatic sealing of records 
for those who commit nonviolent crimes after they turn 15.
  The bill would ban the very cruel and counterproductive practice of 
juvenile solitary confinement that can have immediate and long-term 
detrimental effects on youth detainee mental and physical health. In 
fact, the majority of suicides by juveniles in prisons occur when young 
people are placed in solitary confinement. Other nations even consider 
it torture.
  The bill would, for adults, offer the first broad-based Federal path 
to the sealing of criminal records. A person who commits a nonviolent 
crime will be able to petition a court and make his or her case.
  The bill would enhance the accuracy of criminal justice records. 
Employers requesting a background check from the Federal Bureau of 
Investigation will be provided with only relevant and accurate 
information thanks to a provision that will protect job applicants by 
improving the quality of the Bureau's background check. Think about 
this: 17 million background checks were done by the FBI in 2013, many 
of them for private providers, and upward of half of them were 
inaccurate or incomplete, often causing people to lose a job, miss an 
economic opportunity, and be trapped with few economic options other 
than to reoffend in order to feed a child.
  Finally, the bill would lift a ban on receiving Supplemental 
Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits. The intent of this 
program is to keep low-income families from going hungry. Yet those 
convicted of drug use or possession lose the right to obtain such 
benefits. Once an individual has paid his or her debt to society, a 
path to the reinstatement of those benefits should be available. As 
President George W. Bush said in his 2004 State of the Union Address, 
``America is the land of the second chance, and when the gates of the 
prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.'' This bill 
would do just that.
  Taken together, these measures will help keep kids who get in trouble 
out of a lifetime of crime and help adults who commit nonviolent crimes 
become more self-reliant and less likely to reoffend. This bill is 
supported by 27 organizations, including: the ACLU, the National 
Employment Law Center, the Sentencing Project, the Center for Children 
Law and Policy, the Legal Action Center, the Coalition for Juvenile 
Justice, the General Board of Church and Society, National Juvenile 
Justice Network, and the National Catholic Social Justice Lobby.
  The time to act is now. We cannot afford to let our criminal justice 
system continue to grow at the rate that it is. We cannot afford to sap 
billions of taxpayer dollars from a broken system that is locking 
people up and then doing nothing to empower them to succeed. We cannot 
afford to waste human potential and human productivity.
  We have seen how other individual States--like Georgia, Texas, and 
North Carolina--are taking significant steps to address this issue and 
are lowering both recidivism and the size of their prison population, 
while at the same time lowering actual crime in their States. It is 
time that the Federal Government act to do the same.
  I urge my fellow Senators to support the REDEEM Act so we can make 
our communities safer and stronger and empowers our citizens to live 
productive and strong lives of contribution.

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