Fred Heineman: “Mr. Speaker, on November 16, 1995, I introduced H.R. 2650, the Mandatory Federal Prison Drug Treatment Act, to restore…”

“Mr. Speaker, on November 16, 1995, I introduced H.R. 2650, the Mandatory Federal Prison Drug Treatment Act, to restore equity in the way the Federal Bureau of Prisons [BOP] administers its very successful drug treatment program. This legislation is simple, yet intuitive. Instead of rewarding addicted inmates at the expense of clean inmates, the Mandatory Federal Prison Drug Treatment Act provides a proper incentive to recovering addicts to get treatment without providing them with advantage over other inmates who have not been addicted to narcotics. On June 8, 1995 the Crime Subcommittee held a hearing concerning the Federal Bureau of Prisons. At that hearing, Kathleen Hawk, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons testified that currently, the BOP can allow drug abusers to get out of prison a year earlier than their clean counterparts simply by completing a drug treatment program. This inequity is not based on past criminal history. Rather, these unequal sentences are the result of one inmate's drug addiction. Unfortunately, as now constituted, the BOP can reward a drug addict by taking a year off his sentence after completion of a drug treatment program. This is poor policy as well as simply unfair.”