Tom Feeney: “Mr. Chairman, it does not surprise me that the Congressional Black Caucus long before I got here took the position that…”

“Mr. Chairman, it does not surprise me that the Congressional Black Caucus long before I got here took the position that we should not have the whims and biases and prejudices of individual judges responsible for deviating widely in the sentencing in the same exact types of cases. So I think the chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary has done a wonderful job pointing out the problem when you allow widespread deviation. There really had been no standards. Why have guidelines at all, if judges can make up ad hoc reasons to implement those guidelines? This is an especially important problem in cases of child abuse and in cases of sexual offenses because of the enormously high recidivism rate. We have heard Attorney General Reno says something like 75 percent of sexual offenders are going to repeat their offenses. We know that exhibitionists, for example, have some of the highest sex offense recidivism rates, something like between 41 and 71 percent. The next highest recidivism rate is found among child molesters who offend against boys, somewhere upwards of 40 or 45 percent.”