Political Quotes

“I rise today to express my strong support for the Canady-Geren amendment to H.R. 4092, the crime bill. I believe this legislation is essential to the success of controlling the outbreak of crime and assuring the safety of our children, our senior citizens, and our families. Mr. Chairman, the Federal courts across the Nation are hindering local efforts of law enforcement. By imposing arbitrary caps on the number of prison inmates, criminals are released moments after they are arrested due to lack of holding facilities and prison overcrowding. Police are forced to spend their valuable time apprehending the same criminals who commit the same crimes, hours or days later. In the city of Philadelphia, you cannot be incarcerated pretrial for car jacking, stalking, drug dealing, burglary, manslaughter, or weaponless robbery, no matter how many times you commit these crimes or fail to appear in court, due to prison caps. Mr. Chairman, the criminals across the Nation are winning the war on crime. They have learned that if they refuse to appear for trial, the local law enforcement does not have the facilities to go after them. Criminals rarely, if ever, report for trial. In Philadelphia, of all the defendants released under the prison cap, 47 percent fail to appear in court. What this means is that over a period of 6 years, from 1988 to 1994, over 230,000 cases remained unprosecutable due to prisoners refusing to appear in court.”