Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, it is easy for the public and the press to focus on the issues that divide us in Washington, DC, and around the country. In fact, in Washington, DC, that is a world-class sport--focusing on division, the things that separate us, the things where we clearly can't agree, on occasion--but today I am happy to highlight an area marked by broad consensus and true bipartisan spirit.

In my time in the Senate I have learned that neither political party can get what they want done if they try to do it alone. The only way things happen are when consensus is achieved, and that takes a lot of hard work, a lot of cooperation, and a lot of collaboration. If your goal is 100 percent of what you want or nothing, my experience is you get nothing here.

I know ``compromise'' sometimes is a dirty word in today's lexicon. I was just rereading a quote from Ronald Reagan, somebody conservatives look to as an example of the iconic conservative leader. He was pretty clear that if he could get 75 to 80 percent of what he wanted to achieve, he would say: I will take it, and I will fight about the rest of it another day.

But the good news is we have found a way, amidst a lot of the division and polarization here, to achieve a bipartisan coalition on some important criminal justice reforms. Last week I stood with a bipartisan group and introduced the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015.

This has literally been years in the making, and it was a proud and consequential moment for the Senate.

This week we have kept that momentum going. Senator Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, held a hearing Monday to discuss the new bill with various stakeholders, and tomorrow the Judiciary Committee will vote on sending the bill to the full Senate for consideration.

This legislation is long overdue and a major step forward for the country. Similar to other successful efforts--and particularly those that inform my actions in the Senate--I look to experiences in the State and what has been tried, tested, and found to work and how it might apply to our job here at the national level.

Back in 2007, in Austin, legislators were confronting a big problem. They had a major budget shortfall, an overcrowded prison system, and high rates of recidivism--repeat criminals--or as one former inmate referred to himself in Houston the other day at a roundtable I held, he called himself a frequent flier in the criminal justice system. I think we all know what he meant. But instead of building more prisons and hoping that would somehow fix the problem, these leaders in Austin decided to try a different approach. They scrapped the blueprints for more prisons, and they went to work developing reforms to help low- and medium-risk offenders who were willing to take the opportunity to turn around their lives and become productive members of society.

I think we would have to be pretty naive to say that every criminal offender who ends up in prison is going to take advantage of these opportunities. They will not--not all of them will, but some of them will. Some of them will be remorseful. Some of them will see how they wasted their life, the damage they have done to their families, including their children, and they will actually look for an opportunity to turn around their lives after having made a major mistake and ending up in our prisons.

In my State, we have a pretty well-deserved reputation for being tough on crime. I don't think anybody questions that, but we also realize we need to be smart on crime, and we need to look at how we achieve the best outcomes for the taxpayers and for the lives which can be salvaged and made productive through their hard work and the opportunity we have provided to them. We also realized that even though incarceration does work--I don't think anybody can dispute the fact that when somebody is in prison, they are not committing crimes in our communities and across the country--but here is the rub: One day almost all of them will be released from prison. The question then is, Will they be prepared to live a productive life or will they be that frequent flier who ends up back in prison through the turnstile of a criminal life?
So in Texas we improved and increased programs designed to help men and women to take responsibility for their crimes and to prepare them for reentry into society. The results were pretty startling. Between 2007 and 2012, our overall rate of incarceration fell by 9.4 percent--almost 10 percent--the crime rate dropped by 16 percent, and we saved more than $2 billion worth of taxpayer money and we were able to shutter three prison facilities in the process.

I wish to return briefly to the crime rate. Former Attorney General Mukasey, a longtime Federal judge in New York, made the point that it is not the incarceration rate that measures the success of our sentencing practices, it is actually the crime rate.

I know there are many people who feel we have overincarcerated, but I think we need to keep our eye on the ball; that is, on the crime rate. As a result of these reforms in Texas, our total crime rate dropped by 16 percent, something worth paying attention to, but even more impressive than these statistics are the stories I have heard from former inmates who have actually taken advantage of this opportunity to turn around their lives. They paint a powerful picture of how these reforms can be used and the potential impact of this legislation across the country.

Again, nobody is naive enough to think everybody is going to have a turnaround story and experience like this, but last week I had the chance to visit with a number of faith-based and nonprofit groups in Houston this time, as well as some of the former inmates they have supported--all of whom are helping inmates prepare to reenter society set up for success rather than failure.

I was particularly struck by the story of one young man by the name of Emilio Parker. By the time he was 33, Emilio had spent almost half of his life in prison, including several years in solitary confinement. He started using drugs at a very early age, and after he became addicted he found more and more opportunities for crime to feed his addiction. Spending so much time in prison leaves little chance to acquire skills to succeed once you are outside, but fortunately for Emilio he found the support needed in a group called SER-Jobs for Progress in Houston. SER stands for Service Employment Redevelopment. A strange acronym, SER, but it is a community group whose mission is to equip people such as Emilio for the workforce. Their organization has helped turn around many lives in astounding ways, and Emilio was no exception.

When he started the job readiness program SER offered, he didn't know how to turn on a computer, but with their help he graduated with the program, and it helped put him on a new direction in life--one that did not include prison.

His success represents the tremendous opportunity we have before us to enact similar reforms on the Federal level in order to offer rehabilitation to inmates, reduce crime, and save taxpayers' hard-earned money.

Part of this legislation is to focus on the people most likely to take advantage of these opportunities, low- and medium-risk inmates. Indeed, what we offer them is credit, if they participate in these programs, to lesser confinement; for example, a halfway house or the like. These are the folks we believe are most likely to have learned from their experience in prison and will take advantage of the opportunity and turn around their lives. High-risk criminals who have made a life of crime I think are the least likely to take advantage of these programs and will not be available under this legislation. If it is successful, we might want to reconsider that and see whether it can be expanded.

The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act truly represents how the Senate was meant to function: in a bipartisan manner that can effect long-lasting change for the benefit of the American people.

I thank Chairman Grassley for his leadership--this would not have happened without him--and his commitment to bring us together to develop a bill that provides needed reforms to our criminal justice system. This is an extraordinary moment, where we have people on differing ends of the political spectrum coming together and finding a place where we can reach consensus.

I am particularly pleased, as I have indicated, that the CORRECTIONS Act, authored by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and me, is such a key part of this package. Pretty much everyone agrees our prisons are dangerously overcrowded and that recidivism rates--when offenders land back in prison--are too high. The hard part is coming up with a solution that addresses these problems and yet breaks the cycle of reincarceration without jeopardizing public safety. And nothing we are doing will jeopardize public safety. That should be the litmus test of anything we do. I do believe this legislation strikes that balance by building on our experience in Texas and other States across the country and focusing on rehabilitation for low-level offenders and tough sentences for hardened criminals.

I know the Presiding Officer, who was attorney general of his State of Alaska, has had a lot of experience in this area. I remember in law school one of the things we learned is that one of the goals of our criminal justice system is to rehabilitate people--to help them turn around their lives--but over the years we have almost forgotten that. I think what we have demonstrated by the Texas experience--and other experience--is that through faith-based volunteers, through job training, through helping people deal with their drug and alcohol addiction--which oftentimes exacerbates their problems and puts them behind bars, like Emilio--we can literally offer a helping hand for those who will take advantage of it. For those who are truly nonviolent and low-level offenders, this bill does represent a second chance.

This bill also reforms and improves law enforcement tools, such as mandatory minimum sentences, without eliminating them or reducing them across the board. This was a tough negotiation because, in particular, some of our Senators were focused on sentence reduction, but I have to say I have been very aware that we can't handle this on an across-the-board basis. Sentences have to be appropriate for the individual behavior and misconduct of the defendant themselves, not just some across-the-board panacea. By targeting those who are most likely to reoffend and teaching them how to succeed in the real world, we can not only reduce the crime rate--as our experience has shown in Texas--but help people turn around their lives and save billions of dollars.

So at a time when the news likes to report the divisions and polarizations here in Washington--and there are plenty of important fights, and I am not opposed to fighting for principles, but there are a lot of areas like this where we can continue to work together productively. In fact, as I said earlier, the whole system of our Constitution was designed to force consensus before big decisions such as this are made. That is the way it should be because any time a minority or even one political party can force their will on the other party--as we have seen happen before--it doesn't end well. When our system works the way it should, by people of good faith coming together, seeing a problem, trying to come up with a solution, and working together on a bipartisan basis, our system works very well. I believe this is a good example.

I look forward to working with all of our colleagues once this bill is voted out of the Judiciary Committee--which I believe it will be on Thursday--as we anticipate action here on the floor. Perhaps other Senators have other ideas that will actually improve the legislation we have crafted so far, but I do believe the President is amenable to considering a bill in this area. He has said so publicly. Again, this is another of those rare opportunities we can have to work together with the President to try to solve a problem, help save money, and help people turn around their lives.

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