Save Our Seas Act of 2017

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Let me start by joining my colleague, the Democratic leader, in his words about Lamar Alexander--a great Senator and a personal friend, someone I am sorry is going to bring his Senate career to an end in 2 years because he has done so many good things. I could spell out many of those things, but one comes to mind immediately. A few years ago when I was deciding whether to run for reelection myself, I thought one of my goals would be to increase the Federal investment in medical research. That is right in the wheelhouse of the committee jurisdiction of Lamar Alexander. I went to him and his counterpart on the Democratic side, Senator Patty Murray of Washington, and Roy Blunt of Missouri, and we put together an informal team pushing for increases in medical research. We have had amazing success. It has been bipartisan, and it has been an enthusiastic effort all around. We couldn't have done it without Lamar's wholehearted participation. He was committed to medical research, and as a result, we have had more than a 5-percent increase each year for the last 4 years in the budget and appropriations for the National Institutes of Health. That is going to end up creating more opportunities to spare people suffering and to cure disease and to save lives than we can possibly imagine. That is the kind of thing people expect of us, don't they, in the Senate?

The Democrats and Republicans will find a common goal and work together to achieve it. Lamar Alexander was part of that successful effort. I am going to hold him to it for the next 2 years, as I am sure he will hold me to the same goal. I look forward to working with him but certainly with some pain in my heart, as the Democratic leader said, with the knowledge his career is coming to an end. He has been an extraordinary public servant as a Governor, as a Presidential candidate, as a Cabinet member, and as a Member of the U.S. Senate. I am sorry for his decision, but I certainly understand why he would make that on a personal and family basis.

First Step Act

Madam President, I wish to say a few words about the legislation currently pending before the U.S. Senate. Every once in a while--it doesn't happen very often--the stars line up and the Democrats and Republicans and the conservatives and the progressives and the President and the Congress agree on something. I am not talking about Flag Day or apple pie or whether Lassie was a collie dog. It really comes down, occasionally, to something that is meaningful. We are in the midst now of a debate on the floor of the Senate, which will culminate probably tomorrow in some historic votes on the whole question of criminal justice reform.

How important is this issue? It is so important that we rarely take it up more than once a decade; that we sit down and look at criminal justice standards and laws in America and decide whether we can make them better and more effective.

Just a few minutes ago, my colleague from Texas, Senator Cornyn, a conservative Republican, came to the floor and explained how the State of Texas engaged in prison reform and found out they could not only reduce the prison population but reduce the incidence of crime at the same time. That is what we are setting out to do at the Federal level as well.

Senator Cornyn's prison reform measure, which he introduced with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, has been a central part of our conversation on criminal justice reform.

I had another part of criminal justice reform that I have been working on for a long time. Three decades ago, Congress responded to our Nation's drug epidemic by creating the harshest mandatory minimum sentences in our history. Consider what happened next as we made the penalties for drug use and sales higher than ever in our history. What happened next was the use of illegal drugs in the United States of America actually increased, just the opposite of what we were trying to achieve. The availability of heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine increased, despite harsh criminal penalties. Crime rates for Federal drug offenders did not go down. In other words, longer prison terms did not deter drug use or drug crime, but they did lead to an explosion in our Federal prisons.

Since 1980, the Federal prison population has grown by over 700 percent. Federal prison spending has increased by nearly 600 percent in that period of time. Today, the United States of America holds more prisoners, by far, in prison than any country in the world. America has 5 percent of the world's population, 25 percent of the world's prisoners--more than Russia or China. Our overcrowded Federal prisons consume one-quarter of the Justice Department's discretionary budget. This undermines other important priorities, like preventing crime in our neighborhoods and treating drug addiction.

The largest increase in the Federal prison population is for nonviolent drug offenders. This is largely because of the inflexible mandatory minimum sentences. These mandatory penalties don't allow judges to distinguish between drug kingpins, who should be our focus when it comes to criminal penalties, and lower level offenders. That isn't fair. It isn't smart. It isn't an effective way to keep us safe.

We also have to consider the racially disparate impact of these laws. Listen, the majority of illegal drug users and dealers in America are White, but three-quarters of the people serving time in prison for drug offenses are African American or Latino. The majority of the users and dealers are White, and three-fourths of those who go to prison for drug crimes are African American and Latino, and the large majority of those subject to Federal mandatory minimum penalties fall into that same group of African Americans and Latinos.

As a result of mandatory minimums, the families of nonviolent offenders are separated for years on end. Most of these families are people of color. This has a destructive impact on their communities and erodes faith among them in our criminal justice system.

Most Senators don't come to the floor and say what I am about to say, but let me tell you the worst vote I ever cast. I was a Member of the House of Representatives, and it was about 25 or 26 years ago when I voted for a law that established what became known as the crack powder sentencing disparity. That jumble of words means that under this law, it took 100 times more powder cocaine than crack cocaine to trigger the same minimum sentence--100 times. This came to be known as the 100-to-1 crack-to-powder disparity. Under this law 80 percent of the people sentenced for crack cocaine offenses were African American.

In 2010 I worked with an unlikely ally, then-Senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama. He was a Republican Senator and a member of the Judiciary Committee, and he felt strongly about this issue.

I said to him: Senator Sessions, 100 to 1 isn't fair--that for a tiny handful of crack and a handful of powder cocaine, the handful of crack would get 100 times the sentence as the cocaine doesn't make any sense.

We debated back and forth. I thought it should be one to one in the sentencing. He didn't agree, but the day finally came when we had to make a decision. We actually bargained in the Senate gym. I know the Democratic leader referred to that gym earlier. We get a lot of business done there. We were bargaining in the gym on the day of the committee markup--back and forth and back and forth. Finally, the two of us agreed that it would go from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1. I can't tell you why 18, but it was a compromise. It dramatically reduced the disparity in sentencing between crack cocaine and powder cocaine.

That Fair Sentencing Act passed the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate, the House Judiciary Committee, and the House, and it was signed into law in a very private ceremony by President Obama, which Senator Sessions and I attended.

For the last 5 years, I have been working on the next step--a bipartisan coalition of Republican and Democratic Senators to take the next step on reforming our Federal drug sentencing laws. Five years ago I joined up with another unlikely ally--Mike Lee, a very, very conservative Republican from Utah--to introduce a bill called the Smarter Sentencing Act. We had a problem. There was a Republican Senator who didn't like the bill at all. His name? Chuck Grassley, from Iowa, a conservative Republican. Coincidentally, he is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

After a while, I said to Senator Lee: We are going nowhere without Grassley. We have to get him on board if we are going to change the law.

It took a year, which is just a few minutes in Senate time. It took a year of negotiating for us to finally reach an agreement that Chuck Grassley and Mike Lee and I all signed on to for sentencing reform.

We were joined by Senator Cory Booker in the last year or two, a Democrat from New Jersey. After more than a year of negotiations, we introduced the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, legislation approved by the Judiciary Committee by a vote of 16 to 5 earlier this year.

Around the same time, the House of Representatives passed bipartisan legislation to reform the Federal prison system. This bill was supported--listen to this--by President Donald Trump, cosponsored by Republican Congressman Doug Collins, Democratic Congressman Hakeem Jeffries of New York, and Republican House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia.

I didn't like the original version of this bill because I thought we could do better and we should add criminal sentencing to prison reform.

Then we did something that is rare. We sat down, Democrats and Republicans, and worked it out. We believed that we could come up with a common bipartisan bill by combining the two.

The result is the most extraordinary political coalition I have ever witnessed in the time I have been in Washington. The so-called FIRST STEP Act--the revised FIRST STEP Act--is a bipartisan sentencing and prison reform bill that is sponsored by 34 Senators--17 Republicans and 17 Democrats. It is supported by President Trump and a broad spectrum of stakeholders.

Listen to who is supporting this bill on criminal sentencing reform and prison reform: the Fraternal Order of Police. That is a good starting point. It is the largest police group in America. There is the National District Attorneys Association, the largest group of prosecutors in America. So we have the police and the prosecutors, and we also have the American Civil Liberties Union. Go figure that a bill we put together could bring these folks together in common purpose to pass it.

Our bill would reduce Federal mandatory minimum sentences in a targeted way. We don't repeal any mandatory minimum sentences, and we don't lower any maximum sentences. We would simply allow Federal judges to determine in certain low-level cases, on a case-by-case basis, when the harshest penalties should apply.

The bill also puts in place a recidivism reduction program and prison reform that will facilitate the successful rehabilitation and reentry of prisoners, which Senator Cornyn addressed just a few minutes earlier.

Let me tell you a story about this man here. His name is Alton Mills. In the year 1994, at the age of 24, Alton Mills was given a mandatory life sentence without parole for a low-level nonviolent drug offense.

When Alton Mills stepped into that Federal prison cell with a life sentence, he was stepping into a jail cell for the first time in his life, and he was bound to stay there for the rest of his life.

I ended up being contacted by his public defender. She has this wonderful name. She is from Chicago. Her name is MiAngel Cody. MiAngel Cody contacted me and told me Alton Mills' story--how this kid growing up in Chicago, a decent kid in high school, made a bad turn, got mixed up with a drug gang, was a sales runner on the street, which is just the lowest possible level, and on a third offense got a life sentence to spend the rest of his life in prison.

I asked President Obama to take a look at this and consider commutation. In December of 2015, after serving 22 years in prison, Alton Mills came home to Chicago.

What has he done since then? He has become a mechanic at the Chicago Transit Authority. He got married. He is contributing to society. He has a granddaughter. He is working as a community college student pursuing an associate's degree. If he hadn't received a pardon, Alton Mills was destined to die in prison because of the Federal sentencing laws that we are setting out to change.

The FIRST STEP Act would eliminate this mandatory life sentence for nonviolent drug offenders like Alton Mills, and the bill would also give a chance to thousands of people still serving sentences for nonviolent offenses involving crack cocaine under the 100-to-1 standard I mentioned earlier.

I am going to have more to say about the pending amendments, which will be brought up tomorrow. The Senator from Arkansas is going to offer three amendments that I consider to be poison pills.

After 6 years of hard work putting these bills together--Democrats and Republicans, police, prosecutors, the ACLU, and President Trump and Senator Durbin together on a bill--now comes the Senator from Arkansas, who has introduced three amendments which I think are very destructive to this bill. I am going to oppose all three of them, and I hope he will think twice about them.

We have an opportunity to do something significant, historic, and bipartisan here for the good of this Nation. We could end up reducing the crime rate in our country and do it in a smarter way with sentencing and prison reform. The amendments that he will propose tomorrow--the Senator from Arkansas--have been opposed by groups across the board--left and right, conservative, progressive, Republican, and Democrat. They all oppose his amendments.

I am not going to get into a specific discussion about them until later, but I wanted to let the Senator from Arkansas know that we are hopeful that he will take a more constructive approach. If he goes with the amendments that we have seen, we are going to have to do our best to oppose him.

Some are going to suggest that the underlying bill doesn't go far enough to unwind the harsh mandatory sentencing that I mentioned earlier. I agree. But that is the nature of legislation. It is the nature of compromise. It is what the Senate is all about. A Republican- controlled Senate is considering a bill supported by Senators from both sides of the aisle, and we have a chance to do something. Congress should make this bipartisan legislation a fitting ending to this year. For all of the cynicism and skepticism about what Congress can achieve, we can prove as soon as tomorrow, with one of the most historic changes in criminal justice legislation in our history, that we can work together for the good of this Nation. Our people who send us to this job expect no less.

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