Political Quotes

“when we began this effort, I told the staff to keep working until they could see whether they could satisfy the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Scott], and apparently we have done that, and so we are here today. Also, when we started, I indicated that we want to deal with juvenile crime using a balanced approach, one of prevention and one of accountability. In 1995, juveniles accounted for 32 percent of robbery arrests, 23 percent of weapons arrests, 15 percent of rape arrests, 13 percent of aggravated assault arrests and 9 percent of arrests for murder. Those are pretty serious statistics. We also realized that we could not begin to build enough jails to try to deal with that issue, and it also would not be very wise to do only that. So today we have before us the Juvenile Crime Control and Delinquency Prevention Act. It is an important bill which not only supports making juveniles accountable for their actions but which provides funds to States and local communities to design prevention programs to help youths turn their lives around. Again, we allow the flexibility that we need to allow if local entities are going to do the things that have to be done to bring about the prevention as well as handling of the juveniles who we have difficulty turning around.”