Bob Franks: “Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of this amendment, very strongly, and I urge my colleagues to vote for it. This…”

“Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of this amendment, very strongly, and I urge my colleagues to vote for it. This is a very straightforward amendment that the gentleman from New Jersey has offered, which says, in essence, that when you are a prisoner serving time in a prison, then you are going to have to get your high school diploma or the equivalent of it, the GED, before you are going to get your good time. It is just as simple as that, before you can get out, even a day early, even if we go to every State in this country with truth-in-sentencing, you are still going to have to get a high school diploma or GED to get your good time. It is something that prisoners want to achieve. We need them to have an educational level that will allow them to do something constructive when they get out. I cannot think of a more important amendment, in the sense of trying to do something to make sure that we do not have so high a rate of recidivism, as Mr. Frank's amendment. So I strongly urge its adoption. It is an excellent amendment. It will provide the incentive that is missing now for prisoners to get their GED.”