Patrick Kennedy: “My colleagues, what we are doing today is wrong. We are taking a bill that is supposed to help missing and exploited…”

“My colleagues, what we are doing today is wrong. We are taking a bill that is supposed to help missing and exploited children and runaway and homeless youth, we are taking this program and we are saddling it with a political agenda. We are taking these most vulnerable children in our society, the exploited children of this society, and we are exploiting them for political gain, and this time it is by the United States Congress that wants to beat its chest and say how tough they are on crime. Every single knowledgeable person in this country who works in the area of juvenile crime will tell us that the kind of policy that the Republicans are trying to foist on this Congress is policy that simply does not work. How do we know this? The United States Senate will not even take up this draconian bill, a bill that would put 14-year-old children in the same prison as an adult criminal. They are not taking up this bill because they know it is barbaric.”