Martin Hoke: “That is exactly right. Well, we dealt with that today in the Committee on the Judiciary, as a matter of fact…”

“That is exactly right. Well, we dealt with that today in the Committee on the Judiciary, as a matter of fact, specifically, and in fact there is an element of the bar that makes a full-time living in contacting prisoners and then using shotgun approach lawsuits to file for all kinds of ridiculous and frivolous things like, for example, the food is not good enough, we want better food, we want different kinds of silverware, we want towels that are not so scratchy. I am not making these things up, and the reason they do this is because the bar, the attorneys, can actually be reimbursed their fees, all of them, by the Federal Government when they bring these lawsuits, civil lawsuits, on behalf of prisoners. What we have done is we have said that you can bring the lawsuits. We are not impairing a prisoner's right to bring lawsuits. But you can only be paid if you win, and you can only be paid on the part that you do win on. Now it is a little bit technical; I understand that, but typically what happens is an attorney will file a lawsuit with 50, 60, 70 different complaints and hope that he or she is going to hit on one of them, and then they get paid for the entire lawsuit, all of the time that they supposedly put in. This changes that dramatically.”