Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I am impressed that we want to be as efficient as possible, and I do, too, because it will save money. I want to make a couple of points. The first is that this is probably the fastest growing industry in our economy, building prisons. We now have cities and towns. It is a fast growing industry because we are putting literally billions of dollars in the 1994 crime bill and now billions of dollars additionally, at least two and a half, into this one, and so I rise to join with every efficiency that we can obtain. But I think we want to keep in mind that we want to also ensure that there is an effectiveness coming out of this great new industry that we are building in the United States, namely building prisons which does not make the happiest commentary in the world in what direction we are going since we incarcerate more people than any other industrial country that I know of. So, I would urge all of my colleagues and those who have spoken in favor of this to support the Scott amendment that will be coming up that will ask that we also set aside a fraction of the amount of money merely to determine and study the effectiveness of this enormous new industry that we have spawned at the Federal level.”