Prison Reform

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, as tempted as I am to respond to my good friend from Maryland about the ongoing Democratic filibuster of the Homeland Security funding, I want to spend just a few minutes talking about a topic where there is broad and growing consensus, where both parties have found common ground, and I am talking about the issue of reforming America's prison system.

Pretty much everyone agrees that our prisons are dangerously overcrowded. I think there are roughly 215,000 inmates in Federal custody. And everyone pretty much agrees that by and large people who are in prison are someday going to get out of prison. That, of course, brings about the concern about repeat crimes or recidivism and the fact that it is way too high. I think in many instances it is because we have simply not done enough or maybe have even given up on helping transition people who actually want to transition to a more productive life and providing them with the tools they need to do so.

The hard part about dealing with what I have just described is we have to come up with a solution that addresses these problems without jeopardizing public safety. That, obviously, is a given. It is a challenge, to be sure, but it makes it even more important to find bipartisan consensus and to actually accomplish what we can.

It is in this vein that my colleague from Rhode Island, Senator Whitehouse, and I have joined together to introduce a piece of legislation we call the Corrections Oversight, Recidivism Reduction, and Eliminating Costs for Taxpayers in Our National System Act--or CORRECTIONS Act--to reform our Federal prison system.

That is quite an acronym. It is a mouthful to be sure. But the point is, this is real meaningful reform of our prison system at the Federal level.

Before I describe the specifics of the CORRECTIONS Act, I am going to tell a brief story the Presiding Officer is very familiar with of the success in that laboratory of democracy known as the State of Texas.

Not too long ago Texas lawmakers confronted a problem similar to what I have described here at the national level. We had not only growing budgets for prison construction, we had overcrowded prisons and a high rate of criminal recidivism.

At some point the thought occurred to a group of people that just building more prisons wasn't necessarily the answer. It certainly wouldn't fix the problem on the back end that I described, of people who would eventually get out of prison not being prepared to reenter civil society. But we tried a different approach in Texas: scrapping prison construction plans and instead funding a series of recidivism reduction programs aimed at helping low-risk offenders turn their lives around and become productive members of society and, just as important, not become residents of our prison system once again. These programs are not all that novel. They are well known--things such as drug rehabilitation, educational classes, job training, faith-based initiatives, and something as simple as prison work programs.

In Texas we gave qualified inmates the option of earning credits and completing a portion of their sentence in lower levels of custody--home confinement, halfway houses, community supervision--which is dramatically cheaper than the big-box prisons that are very expensive.

The results speak for themselves. Between 2007 and 2012 our State's overall incarceration rate fell almost 10 percent--9.4 percent--our total crime rate dropped 16 percent, and taxpayers saved more than $2 billion.

Again, the Presiding Officer knows as well, Texas has a certain reputation when it comes to crime. We are not soft on crime. We are tough on crime. We believe if you do the crime, you should do the time. But I think what we have come up with is a model that can be used at the national level.

Senator Whitehouse this morning, in a press conference we did together, talked about how similar initiatives that took place in Rhode Island produced similar results. But I think one of the keys to this is the recidivism reduction programs because these have proven successful for medium-risk and low-risk inmates and delivered positive results.

This bill would also make a number of other reforms. I guess perhaps the most important, and the first one I will mention, is a risk assessment program, regular risk assessments for inmates, to determine whether they are a low, medium or high risk of recidivism. Indeed, we would not allow high-risk inmates to participate in this program of earning good time credit toward less restrictive custody, but they could, if they were motivated enough to change their status from high risk to medium risk. They could then begin that. So the incentives are clearly there.

These assessments would assign prisoners to appropriate programming to ensure the system is working efficiently and effectively. In other words, if someone has a mental health issue, obviously they would be directed in a particular way. If somebody doesn't have employable job skills, obviously that would call for some training program so they could acquire those kinds of skills. People who have drug and alcohol problems obviously could be directed toward something that could help them learn to free themselves from those challenges.

To me, one of the great things about this particular approach is that it operates on incentives. As an incentive, lower risk offenders who successfully complete their programs would earn up to 25 percent of their remaining sentence in home confinement or a halfway house.

To be clear, these earned time credits would be available only to inmates who have been vetted by the Bureau of Prisons and classified as low-risk offenders. The Nation's most violent offenders would be excluded from earning any credit under this legislation. During these budget-constrained times, it is important to point out that this bill would not involve any additional spending. Instead, it would rely on job programs and partnerships of faith-based groups and nonprofits, and the reinvestment potentially of the savings generated by transitioning lower risk offenders to less restrictive forms of custody.

If it works as it has at the State level, it is going to save money because we will be building fewer prisons. Indeed, in Texas I believe we have actually shuttered three existing prison units because we simply don't need them because of this new approach.

Make no mistake, though, the prisoners eligible for these program are all people who eventually will get out of prison anyway. What we are trying to do is make sure the very high risk of repeating and recidivism would go down by better preparing them to reenter society. Our goal would be to make it less likely that they would commit new crimes and wind up behind bars again.

So the hope and expectation is this bill would go a long way toward improving public safety, it would save taxpayers money, and it would ease some of the burden on our Federal prisons just like we experienced in Texas.

This bill, at a time when we seem to be very divided on a number of topics, is a consensus piece of legislation. It was voted out of the Judiciary Committee late last year by an overwhelming vote. I think those who expressed some reservations at the time just wanted more opportunity to talk about it and learn more about it, and perhaps they had other ideas they wanted to consider adding to it.

In addition to Senator Whitehouse, there have been a number of colleagues who have been very interested in criminal justice reform, and this is just one place, one starting point, which I think enjoys perhaps the broadest consensus. But I don't think we ought to be afraid of the larger discussion that a number of our colleagues, including the Presiding Officer, have talked about--things such as mandatory minimums, sentencing reforms; the overcriminalization of our regulatory regime, where people who inadvertently violate some regulation find themselves actually accused of a crime.

I think all of these are fair game, but I think the most important thing for us to do is to start--start somewhere--where there is a broad consensus. Let's get done what we can get done, and let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I think if we can establish, both from the Judiciary Committee and then on the floor of the Senate, that we are capable of moving bipartisan legislation such as this forward and sending it to the President for his signature, hopefully we will start a growing trend of doing that, and this will be the beginning, and not the end, of our discussions and hopefully our productivity when it comes to criminal justice reform.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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