[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 172 (Wednesday, October 25, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6786-S6787]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                            CORRECTIONS Act

  Mr. President, I also want to bring up another important piece of 
legislation I reintroduced this last week, the Corrections Oversight, 
Recidivism Reduction, and Eliminating Cost to Taxpayers in Our National 
System Act. Let me call it the CORRECTIONS Act for short because that 
is a mouthful. I am grateful to my Democratic cosponsor, the junior 
Senator from Rhode Island, Mr. Whitehouse, for joining me on what is, 
like the SAFER Act, significant bipartisan legislation.
  My home State of Texas has a well-deserved reputation for being tough 
on crime, but we have also learned over time that it is important to be 
smart on crime too. We successfully implemented statewide criminal 
justice reforms that help low-risk offenders become productive members 
of society once they reenter civil society from prison, and the State 
is focused on the important role rehabilitation can play.
  I am not naive enough to think that every person who is imprisoned 
behind bars, having been convicted of a criminal offense, is going to 
take advantage of the opportunity to right their path and to get on 
with their life, but some will, and given the proper assessments and 
incentives, we have found that this sort of approach works.
  The CORRECTIONS Act that Senator Whitehouse and I have introduced 
builds off of the State models that have worked in Rhode Island, 
Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, and elsewhere, and it requires the Bureau of 
Prisons to provide programs that partner with faith-based and 
community-based organizations to better prepare these men and women to 
become law-abiding and active members of society. I hope the Senate can 
follow Texas's lead and implement these commonsense, bipartisan 
reforms.
  This bill achieves a number of objectives, which I will mention 
briefly.
  First, it requires the Department of Justice to develop risk-
assessment tools to evaluate the recidivism potential of all eligible 
offenders.
  Second, it refocuses resources on those offenders most likely to 
commit future crimes and allows lower risk inmates to serve their 
sentences under less restrictive conditions, thus reducing prison 
costs, so the taxpayer wins too.
  Third, the bill expands programming--such as substance abuse 
treatment and vocational training--that has been proven to reduce 
recidivism.
  Fourth, it requires the Bureau of Prisons to foster partnerships with 
faith-based and nonprofit and community-based organizations in order to 
deliver a broad spectrum of programming to prisoners.
  Next, it allows inmates who successfully complete recidivism-
reduction programs to earn credit toward time in prerelease custody, 
while eliminating eligibility for inmates convicted of serious crimes.
  Additionally, the bill requires the Department of Justice to 
implement inmate reentry pilot projects across the country and to study 
their effects so that we can gain a better understanding of what works 
and what doesn't work when it comes to offenders' reintegration into 
society.
  Finally, the CORRECTIONS Act creates a national commission to review 
every aspect of our criminal justice system. The last review of this 
type was done in 1965. And while I think Congress--certainly this is 
within our wheelhouse, but we probably don't have the bandwidth to do 
this, which is why this national commission is so important to be able 
to report back to Congress and make recommendations to us.
  We know one thing for sure: that when people serve their sentence and 
they are released from prison, they are going to reenter society. Why 
wouldn't we want to make sure those who are willing to deal with their 
addiction, to learn a skill, to get a GED, and to otherwise improve 
their lives--why wouldn't we want to make sure they are better prepared 
when they reenter civil society? Otherwise, they are left with this 
turnstile of crime where they go from prison, to the community, to 
committing another crime, to another conviction, and back to prison 
again.

  Our focus should be on helping individuals find a productive path as 
contributing members of society, and that involves making sure 
returning to prison doesn't happen because there is no alternative. By 
implementing job training, drug rehabilitation, and mental health 
treatment, we can focus and save taxpayer dollars, lower crime and 
incarceration rates, decrease recidivism, and most importantly, we can 
help people change their own lives for the better.
  Joining State and local officials at the forefront of this are groups 
like Prison Fellowship and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which 
create programs for inmates, such as the Prison Entrepreneurship 
Program--or PEP for short--which teaches prisoners how to start and 
manage their own businesses when they begin life on the outside. You 
would be amazed by individuals who started their own businesses through 
the PEP program and turned their lives around in the process through 
the mentorship and fellowship that these programs provide.
  I hope we can learn from the laboratories of democracy, known as the 
States, where we implemented successful criminal justice reform 
programs--this time, in our prison system--where we will all benefit. 
Taxpayers benefit because we will have to incarcerate fewer people 
because they won't continue this cycle of release, offend, and

[[Page S6787]]

reincarceration--at least a certain percentage of them won't. We can 
help people whose lives are in a tailspin because of drug or alcohol 
addiction or who feel as though they are on a dead-end street because 
they simply don't have the job skills or the education in order to 
compete in the economy.
  I hope we can follow the lead of successful experiments in our 
States, such as Texas, and implement these commonsense, bipartisan 
reforms in our Federal prison system.
  Mr. President, let me say in conclusion that I know the 
administration is very interested in engaging on criminal justice 
reform. Last year, we worked on a sentencing and prison reform bill 
that unfortunately seems to not be going anywhere. While the prison 
reform component of it seems to have a consensus of support here in the 
Congress and I think could pass and be signed into law, the sentencing 
reform piece is a little more controversial and I know divides even the 
Republican conference, and I am not sure what it does with the 
Democratic conference. But I believe we ought to start on a step-by-
step basis, get what we can get done, and get it to the President for 
his signature, while providing these tools to inmates who are 
incarcerated through the Bureau of Prisons, and then keep working on 
the other parts on which we perhaps have not yet been able to build 
consensus.
  I hope our colleagues will work with us on this important piece of 
legislation as we work to reform our criminal justice system in ways 
that make sense and that save taxpayer dollars.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.