Disapproving the Action of the District of Columbia Council in Approving the Revised Criminal Code Act of 2022

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, last year, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I convened a bipartisan hearing on carjacking. It was the first-ever Judiciary Committee hearing on the subject. We heard from experts in law enforcement and the automobile industry. And since then, I have been working with Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican from Iowa, on a bill we are going to introduce soon on the subject.

The Senator from Arkansas is a member of the Committee on the Judiciary. He did not attend our hearing, and he has never raised this issue with me. In fact, he introduced the bill we are considering at this moment yesterday.

Why now? Well, he is very open when he said on the floor and what he said in his press release. Later this afternoon, there will be a vote on the DC Criminal Code. One of the issues is carjacking. He is trying to hitch a ride on this train in terms of the discussion of the penalties for crime. It is no coincidence.

Senator Cotton has brought this bill to the floor because, today, we are voting on that resolution. The opponents of the resolution have focused on the bill's new sentence for carjacking, reducing the penalty from 40 years to 24, and ignored the fact that the resolution increases sentences for a host of other violent offenses and goes after crime guns--a source of gun crimes in many cities, including Washington and those I represent.

Don't take my word for it. The Senator's own press release explicitly links his new bill to today's vote. The Senator knows this bill is not going to pass today. He wants a Democrat to object so he can falsely claim we don't care about carjacking.

The reality is that the Senator's bill would not help prevent carjacking, and it would make our Federal prisons less safe.

Let me explain. The Senator from Arkansas' bill is called No Early Release for Carjackers Act. Catchy title. But it fails to recognize one basic fact: Carjackers cannot get early release from the Federal system. Like every other Federal sentence, it is measured in years. Carjacking sentences have a full-term release date and a good conduct release date. If you go to Federal prison, you earn 54 days a year of good conduct credit if you follow the rules. If you break the rules, they take away your good conduct time. That has been the standard in the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, which abolished Federal parole.

Every Federal judge knows about good conduct time when they impose a sentence. Earning good conduct time isn't getting released early. It is getting released when you really expected to, so long as you behave and follow the rules.

I made it a point of visiting prisons regularly as a Member of Congress and Member of the U.S. Senate. I recommend it to all my colleagues. We spend a lot of time talking about criminal sentencing and criminals themselves and very little time actually visiting prisons to see what life is like behind bars. It is an educational experience.

I can tell you one thing you will come to realize right off the bat: It is a dangerous place. The men and women who are corrections officers in the Federal system literally risk their lives every single day to keep those incarcerated who have been sentenced by the courts. They ask us for very little: enough people to do the job right, safety in the workplace, and those few incentives that make it possible for them to have a decent day at work and go home alive at the end of the day.

One of those things is good conduct. If they can incentivize prisoners not to beat up other prisoners or the correction officers themselves with the promise of good conduct reductions in their sentences, it is a very important thing to do. We want these men and women, these law enforcement professionals, to have respect and also to have the law on their side.

There are no Federal offenses that disqualify you from good conduct time--not a single one. And for good reason. Good conduct time is an incentive to follow the rules in prison. That is what we want people who have broken the law to do while they are in prison: learn to follow the rules. The threat of losing good conduct time is also a deterrent against breaking the rules. That helps prevent violence in prison, protects correction officers, and protects the other incarcerated people. Good conduct time is a critical tool for Federal prison officials to maintain order. That is why we don't disqualify anyone from good conduct time based on their offense of conviction. This bill would be the first time in history. We have never done it before, and we shouldn't start now.

Now, this is not the first time that this Senator has opposed efforts to rehabilitate prisoners. The reason he is trying to dismantle good conduct credit is because carjackers are already excluded from an important rehab program created by the FIRST STEP Act. He comes to the floor regularly to criticize the FIRST STEP Act, which he didn't support, and it is his right not to. He fails to mention two things. It was a bipartisan measure introduced by the primary sponsor at the time, Senator Grassley, and myself and Senator Lee. It was signed into law by President Donald Trump. Soft on crime? This bill passed by an overwhelming vote of 87 to 12 in the Senate. It was signed into law by President Trump.

Unlike most Republican Senators, Senator Cotton opposed the FIRST STEP Act. The FIRST STEP Act established earned time credits that allowed prisoners to earn time off their sentences in exchange for completing programs that help reduce the likelihood they will commit a new crime after their release. The bill included a compromise and excluded from the program individuals who had committed any of dozens of offenses. Carjacking is one of those offenses. So the criticism he is making of the FIRST STEP Act doesn't apply to the argument he made on the floor.

No matter how many recidivism-reducing programs a carjacker completes, no matter how many classes he takes or how many skills he learns, he cannot earn a day off his sentence under the FIRST STEP Act--exactly the opposite of what the Senator from Arkansas just said.

That compromise wasn't enough for the junior Senator from Arkansas. He offered an amendment to the FIRST STEP Act that would have excluded tens of thousands of low-level offenders for earned time credits. And I stood here on the Senate floor to oppose that amendment because I knew then and I know now the purpose of a recidivism reduction program is to reduce recidivism. Almost everyone in the Federal Bureau of Prisons will get out one day. And when we exclude people from these programs, we do not facilitate successful reentry, and we do not reduce recidivism.

Now let's talk about what we can do to reduce carjacking. I have been working for months on a bill with Senator Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Our Combating Carjacking Act is based on recommendations from experts who came to our hearing last year.

I have discussed one key provision many times with the sheriff of Cook County, Tom Dart, and here is what it does. Almost any car manufacturer today has some kind of vehicle location system built into it. It is a device that automatically calls for help if you have been in an accident.

This system is a great way to locate cars right away in real time after they have been carjacked, and that should be a huge deterrent to carjacking. If you take a car by threat of violence, law enforcement should be able to find you right away, take back the car, and put you under arrest for your crime.

But right now, law enforcement has a hard time getting auto manufacturers to provide that location data, even when the victim, the vehicle owner, is standing there saying: Please help the police find the person who just stole my car.

Why? Some manufacturers are better than others about this, but they tell us that we are worried about violating the Federal Driver Privacy Act, and they are worried about liability.

So the bill we are working on, on carjacking, creates an exception to the Driver Privacy Act. It says, if a car manufacturer gets a reasonable, good-faith request from law enforcement for vehicle location data after a carjacking, they can provide that location data without liability because we want to make carjacking a crime that never pays off, and it won't if carjacked vehicles can be immediately tracked and recovered. That is why we are pursuing this.

As I said before, I agree with Senator Cotton, carjacking is a serious problem that needs local and Federal solutions. I invite him to join me and Senator Grassley in our bipartisan effort. I don't agree that wiping out good conduct credit for Federal prisoners is the way to do it.
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