Save Our Seas Act of 2017

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, at 5:30, we will be voting on the first procedural step to take up criminal justice reform legislation that started back in 2013 when I introduced a bill we called Federal prison reform. This legislation is based on prison reform, but it has taken on some additional attributes relative to how we sentence and how judges sentence people convicted of various crimes.

Let me explain a little bit about why this should be a priority for the Senate and for the Congress and for the country. We know the cycle of crime is all too common. People commit crimes. They serve time in prison. They get out of prison. They commit another crime. They serve time again in prison. They are released.

A few years ago, this is what one young man in Houston said when he was talking about his own experience: He called himself a ``frequent flyer''--somebody caught in that revolving door of prison and crime.

In Texas, in 2007, or thereabouts, we had some farsighted visionary leaders, actually, who decided instead of just being tough on crime, which Texas has always had a reputation for, we needed to be smart on crime too. A little more than a decade ago, Texas prisons were bursting at the seams. We had more people incarcerated in Texas prisons than any State in the Nation, and tragically we also had high recidivism rates. So it was obvious we were doing something wrong, and we needed to up our game.

The Legislative Budget Board in our State estimated that in the next 5 years, Texas would need as many as 17,000 new prison beds to house the growing inmate population. So two options became clear: build more costly prisons with the same tragic results or fix the system, and we chose the latter.

I would say, some of our colleagues and some of the critics of the underlying bill say: Well, the best way to keep communities safe is to keep criminals in prison. There are some people, sadly, who will never take advantage of the opportunity to transform their lives through faith-based programs, deal with their drug and alcohol addiction, learn a skill, get a GED; in other words, there are some people, unfortunately, we can't save, but there are others who understand they have made a mistake and paid their debt to society and want to turn their lives around. Those are the type of people this criminal justice reform bill speaks to.

In the beginning in my State, the decision was largely driven by cost. The estimated pricetag to build new prisons exceeded $2 billion. You can imagine what that does to a State's budget, but instead of leaving taxpayers with the bill and just moving on, a visionary group of State legislators decided to dive further into the problem to try to understand it better and propose cost-effective ways to fix it. These fixes came in a number of forms which, looking back on it now, seem pretty obvious, pretty intuitive but, at the time, really was revolutionary.

First were improvements in our parole system, which means that once people got out of prison, people were then supervised while out of prison to make sure they met the conditions of their parole. They didn't get involved with the same bad company that helped them get in trouble in the first place, and they didn't start using drugs again, and they kept fully employed.

So this parole supervision targeted 10 percent fewer revocations and graduated sanctions for small rules violations such as missed meetings. That is particularly important because one of the first indications that somebody who is on parole is in trouble is when they don't show up for their meeting with their parole officer. In the past, that was just pretty much blown off until those missed meetings began to accumulate, and then, ultimately, that individual found themselves arrested, back in jail, and ultimately back in prison. So rather than letting these small infractions pile up, eventually sending the person back to prison, each misstep was dealt with swiftly and surely.

In 2005, $55 million was appropriated to Texas probation departments to make improvements in how we supervise people who had once been in prison, with most of the funds going toward reducing caseloads. In other words, parole officers, probation officers, if they have to handle so many cases, they can't give them the individual attention they need and that the formerly incarcerated individual will benefit from. That brought the number of cases down from nearly 150 in some areas to 110 probationers per officer. This allowed for closer supervision and constant application of sanctions when called for.

The results were pretty dramatic. In 2005, our State was paroling 21,000 prisoners, 11,000 of whom returned to prison after committing other crimes. So that means a little more than 50 percent were eventually going back to prison. A decade later, putting in place these reforms, the State paroled 28,000 prisoners, and about 4,500 came back--or only 16 percent. So we went from about half of the people in prison being paroled without much supervision and much help to only 16 percent because of these reforms.

These reforms, as I said at the outset, may not look so obvious--and it seems so intuitive that it seems clear to us today--but at the time, it was pretty groundbreaking.

As we all know, for many politicians, one of their biggest fears when it comes to their next election is being accused of being soft on crime, but, again, this is not about being tough on crime or soft on crime, this is about being smart on crime and getting the best results.

The decline in revocations led to the savings of $119 million for Texas taxpayers--more than double the initial investment in these programs.

Second were improvements to prison alternatives for low-level, nonviolent offenders. Judges and prosecutors and corrections officials were frustrated by the number of these individuals who kept ending up right back where they started, with no real change in their trajectory and certainly no more hope for their future. So the State started to provide funding to increase access to things like substance abuse treatment, drug courts, and mental illness treatment.

Again, the reason why people end up in prison often has very little to do with their desire to live a life of crime; many of them feed their addiction by theft and other crimes. People who are mentally ill who go to jail or prison, without a diagnosis in treatment, don't get any better, and when they get let out of jail and prison, they just go back deteriorating until they become a danger to themselves and others.

In addition, mandatory prerelease programs were expanded to reduce the backlog of inmates waiting to complete these requirements. In other words, there were a lot more people who wanted to go through these programs because they recognized the benefit to themselves and their families, but they just simply couldn't get into the programs because there weren't enough slots.

For example, the expansion of a drug treatment plan brought down wait time from 1 year to 4 months. If you are somebody with a drug problem, and you are told: ``We don't have room for you. Come back in a year,'' that can be, obviously, discouraging and not result in getting them the help they need.

Moving the wait time for drug treatment down from 1 year to 4 months moved two-thirds of the waitlist into treatment, after which they were released, only to see a more hopeful and better outcome.

In Texas, the model worked. Not only did we avoid building new prisons, we have actually closed eight prisons in Texas. Again, this sounds a little shocking if you are from other parts of the country where you hear about our tough-on-crime reputation, but because of these reforms, we were actually able to close eight prisons because they were no longer needed. We quickly saw a reduction in both incarceration and crime rates by double digits at the same time.

To me, this is the essence of criminal justice reform. There are some who say: We need to do criminal justice reform because, well, we simply imprison too many people. There are others who say: Well, we imprison people for offenses that are disproportionate to what they have done. To me, the essence of criminal justice reform is reducing the crime rate--in other words, increasing and improving public safety.

Other States took notice of what was happening and started to do the same. Georgia, Rhode Island, and North Carolina quickly followed suit, and we have seen several other States across the United States adopt similar reforms.

When I say we saw a reduction in both incarceration and crime rates, let me give a couple of numbers.

From 2005 to 2016, Texas's FBI index crime plummeted by more than 34 percent. In the same period, the incarceration rate dropped 23 percent. Those are pretty shocking and surprising numbers. The crime rate went down 34 percent, and the incarcerate rate dropped 23 percent. You would think the opposite would be true--that with incarceration rates going down, the crime rate would go up--but because of these visionary programs and reforms, they simply worked in tandem to both reduce the incarceration rate and improve public safety at the same time.

It is clear now, based on experience, that these reforms and outcomes are real. I have been working with my colleagues in the Senate Judiciary Committee since 2013 to try to bring these reforms now to the national level. The FIRST STEP Act is our opportunity to do just that this week in the Senate.

Thanks to the primary sponsors of the FIRST STEP Act--the Senator from Illinois, who has joined us here in the Chamber, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Grassley, Mike Lee, Pat Leahy, and others who have worked on this bill. Sheldon Whitehouse and I worked primarily on the prison reform bill.

The current bill has undergone some major improvements over the last few weeks, which I am very proud of. The previous version of this legislation had a number of very positive attributes. In fact, more than three-quarters of the bill was based on the CORRECTIONS Act that Senator Whitehouse and I introduced in 2014, which is the prison reform component of the legislation. But the remainder--the sentencing elements in the bill--was more controversial, and many of my concerns were shared by members of the law enforcement community.

As I was gauging where Members stood on the bill, it was clear that many could not support the old version of the bill and needed the primary sponsors of the bill--whom I mentioned a moment ago--to work with them to try to make it more acceptable to law enforcement, which was going to send a signal to many other Senators about whether they should get behind the bill.

We have all learned how to get things done here in the Senate, and that is not to just point out the problems with legislation but to listen and work together to find solutions, and that is exactly what we did. We spent a lot of time talking to national law enforcement organizations and those in Texas. I know we all value the input of our sheriffs, police chiefs, and other law enforcement professionals, and we tried to work with them to figure out how we could make this bill stronger. I listened to feedback from our Nation's police officers and sheriffs, and we all got to work. We had meetings, we negotiated, and we compromised with colleagues on both sides of the aisle, as well as friends across the Capitol in the House.

We also worked with the White House, whom we have all stayed in constant contact with on this issue since the Trump administration took office nearly 2 years ago. Jared Kushner, the President's son-in-law, has been relentless in his pursuit of getting this criminal justice reform bill done, and I know each of us who has been involved in this legislation has talked to him almost on a daily basis, sometimes many times in a given day.

This bill is the product of those negotiations and those changes, and I am not the only one who is happy with the result. Since these improvements have been made, the bill has been endorsed by a number of important groups, including the National Association of Counties, the Texas Municipal Police Association, the Fraternal Order of Police, and the Council of State Governments. I appreciate the dedication and hard work of our colleagues who worked on this to get the bill to where it is today.

Before tonight's cloture vote, I want to correct some misconceptions floating around about what this bill will and will not do.

There are some who, for example, say that this legislation will put violent criminals and sex offenders back on the streets, which is completely false. Let me say that again because I think it bears repeating. This bill will not allow dangerous, violent criminals to be released early. That is pure fiction.

Not everyone is eligible to earn the credits that lead to early release based on their participation in these programs which I talked about a moment ago. This bill specifically lists 48 offenses that disqualify offenders from earning time credits, including crimes such as murder, specified assault, carjacking that results in injury or death, and unlawful possession or use of a firearm by violent criminals and drug traffickers.

Simply put, we use the most modern social science evaluation tools to find out who is at low risk of reoffending. They are the ones who get the benefit of these programs because we think these are the ones who are most likely to have a good outcome and not end up back in prison. We have disqualified violent offenders, including anybody who either used or displayed or happened to be carrying a firearm during the course of committing their offense.

Those who have not committed one of those crimes aren't automatically eligible. In fact, nobody is automatically eligible for the benefits of this program. As I said, they have to be evaluated to be at minimum or low recidivism risk. That decision isn't made by Congress; it is made by the experienced law enforcement professionals and wardens in the Federal Bureau of Prisons who work with these men and women every day.

It is important that we look at people who are at low risk of recidivism and low risk to public safety in the community because what we can do is use the resources not to keep people like that behind bars unnecessarily but to focus on the truly violent criminals who are not likely to be rehabilitated because, frankly, they don't want to be rehabilitated. Focusing on the most dangerous criminals and keeping them behind bars, while providing relief to those who earned that time credit, just makes common sense.

Some people are falsely claiming that the FIRST STEP Act will retroactively release illegal immigrants and top-level drug traffickers by increasing the good time credit by 7 days a year. Again, that is simply not true. All the bill does is clarify Congress's original intent when it comes to good time credit.

Good time credit is different from the earned credit for participating in these various programs. But you can imagine how important this is to the safety of the jailers, wardens, and public law enforcement officials in the prisons because it gives inmates hope that if they lead exemplary lives while in prison, they have greater hope of earning good time credit and getting out earlier.

All this does is clarifies Congress's original intent that 54 days of good time credit be available rather than the 47 days that the Bureau of Prisons had interpreted under previous law that was more ambiguous. So that is not a change to what Congress intended but merely a clarification of preexisting congressional intent.

In addition, some of the bill's detractors are claiming it will allow gang members and high-risk inmates to be transferred to lower security prisons in order to be closer to their homes. This, too, is false. Gang members and high-risk inmates will not be transferred to lower security prisons under this bill. While the bill does call for inmates to be transferred to a prison within 500 miles of their release residence, that only applies if there are no security concerns and is subject to availability of beds and other conditions.

For example, a member of the dangerous MS-13 gang is held in maximum security over 500 miles from their release residence. There happens to be a minimum-security prison within 500 miles of their release residence. They would not be transferred. We simply don't transfer violent criminals to medium-security prisons because they happen to be within 500 miles of their residence.

There has been a lot of mythology, misunderstanding, and misrepresentation of what is in the bill. The goal of this bill is not to release broad swaths of criminals--in fact, it is just the opposite. This legislation allows prisons to help criminals transform their lives, if they are willing to take the steps and responsibility to do so, so that we are not perpetuating the cycle of crime that continues to plague communities across the country and to drain taxpayer dollars in the process and damage public safety.

I thank all of our colleagues who have worked so hard on this legislation. I think one of the most important attributes of a legislator--certainly of a Senator--is to listen to our constituents, listen to the feedback from our Members, and help build a better bill that will garner significantly more support than it otherwise would have had. I am confident that the Senate will pass this bill, and we can soon send it to the President's desk for his signature.

Recognition Of The Minority Leader

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