[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Pages 15681-15682]
[From the U.S. 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 the list of supporting organizations, including 
judges, lawyers, police, public

[[Page 15682]]

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.

                          ____________________